


Robotics

by boombangbing



Series: Magnetic [5]
Category: Captain America (2011), Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (2012)
Genre: F/M, M/M, Multi, Polyamory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-09
Updated: 2011-11-09
Packaged: 2017-10-25 21:20:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 29,525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/274916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/boombangbing/pseuds/boombangbing
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Tony starts to grow up. Maybe. A little.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Robotics

**Author's Note:**

> Holy crap, I have no idea why this is so long. It just would not stop. I also still cannot title stuff to save my life.

Loki returns on a Tuesday. He magics away half of the Lower East Side and freezes the Long Island Sound before he's apprehended by Thor.

“I guess he just needed someone to show him some kindness,” Steve says, looking pleased at the day's outcome. They've been chasing this goddamn trickster god around the country for the last two weeks; Tony's rapidly coming to the conclusion that it's all sunshine and puppies inside that head of Steve's.

“He made thousands of hipsters blink out of existence!” Tony shakes his head and drains his bottle of water; goddamn he hates going to New Mexico. “And then, even worse, he brought them back.”

Steve frowns, peeling off his uniform's top and neatly placing it in his locker. “They're into jazz in the Lower East Side?”

“Oh, don't you start that 1940s shit with me again!”

“They must be real hepcats then,” Steve says, ducking behind his open locker door before Tony throws the empty water bottle at him.

“When I said that you needed a better personality, this is not what I meant,” Tony says, and Steve just laughs, closing the locker door. He moves closer to Tony, crowding him against the lockers – like a collie, Tony thinks idly; in fact that pretty much describes him to a tee – and leans in until their noses almost touch, except that, of course, Tony's nose only reaches his mouth because, as he's often reminded, Tony is _short_. He's the same height as Clint, but that doesn't stop anyone, least of all Clint.

Steve is blushing, just a little, pink creeping in on his cheeks. He still isn't quite comfortable with making the first move, but Tony makes everyone work for his affection, so he just leans his head against the locker and watches lazily as Steve screws up his courage. Steve huffs a little, the corners of his mouth turning up, and then he's pressing a kiss to Tony's lips – emphasis on the 'pressing', but Tony'll take what he can get. Steve places a hand on either side of him, palms pressed on the cool metal, and he's still so damn stiff, hasn't quite got out a soldier-boy mode yet. Tony slips a hand underneath the waistband of his pants, skittering his nails along Steve's abdomen, where he knows, from long and careful research, that Steve is the most ticklish.

It works; Steve shivers, his arms dropping a couple of inches. He tries to get away from Tony's roving hands, and when that doesn't work, he presses in closer, one knee braced against the locker.

“There we go,” Tony murmurs into the kiss, sliding his hands around and underneath the back of Steve's undershirt. Steve opens his mouth, letting Tony run his tongue along his bottom lip.

“Will Tony Stark and Steve Rogers please report to meeting room one immediately,” Coulson's flat voice says over the speaker system.

“Urgh.” Tony pulls away from Steve reluctantly, biting his bottom lip lightly before he does. He lays a hand on Steve's cheek. “You better wipe that smile off your face, or people are gonna start suspecting shit.”

“Right.” Steve nods his head once, and purses his lips, trying to look serious.

“How you ever led anyone anywhere with that face remains a mystery,” Tony says, turning Steve around and pushing him towards the door.

-

Rehabilitating Loki apparently requires the presence of all the Avengers in New York. Tony suspects that Fury just wants Steve back under S.H.I.E.L.D. jurisdiction and away from the eyes of the Californian paparazzi. Coulson also cites training and team-building as reasons for the enforced togetherness.

“I think too much team-building might be the root of many of our problems,” Bruce says into his cup of chamomile tea.

“Did you just make a joke, doc?” Clint asks, reclining in his chair at an alarming angle. Tony wishes he'd fall – this meeting could do with some fun, and Steve is ignoring his rousing game of footsie – but Clint has incredible balance and short of giving the chair a helping kick, he's not going anywhere.

“It wasn't a joke,” Bruce says dryly.

“Nevertheless,” Coulson continues, “Fury has scheduled training days; we're starting with sharp-shooting. You need to learn how to use a gun, Dr Banner. He also wants you to practice hand-to-hand.”

“Is this really necessary? I don't think... that's a very good idea,” Bruce replies.

“Perhaps, but there are going to be times when it won't be feasible for you to...”

“Hulk out,” Tony supplies.

Coulson gets as close to a scowl as he ever does. “ _Transform_ , and for those times you need to be able to defend yourself in other ways.”

“I'll practice with you,” Steve says. Bruce looks uncertain, eyes flicking from Coulson to Steve and back again. “Or you could spar with Thor,” Steve adds, and lets the idea hang there.

“You'd hulk out in minutes with Thor,” Tony says. “'Cause he's so annoying, you know.”

Thor scowls, but doesn't disagree. Natasha clicks her tongue. “I don't think this is a good idea either,” she says.

Everyone from the delivery people up to Fury, and probably the president himself, love Steve; almost bordering on the bizarrely protective. Tony has taken to reminding them that Steve happens to be closer to thirty than twenty (as well as being temporally, like, ninety), but it falls on deaf ears.

“I think I can handle it,” Steve insists. “No offence, Bruce.”

Bruce shrugs a shoulder and does his not-quite-a-smile thing. “Fine. Hopefully I won't kill you, Steve.”

“Hopefully,” Steve agrees.

-

Being a superhero is awesome. He gets to hang out with assassins, freaky science experiments, gods, and war heroes; which is cool, even if he'd never say as much. It also has the added bonus of making Rhodey pissy and jealous.

Not being CEO of Stark Industries any more is also awesome, as it cuts his accountability down by at least half. It's not like he ever actually did anything in the position, and really, he was running that company into the ground, always had been.

These two awesome things in unison, though, suck, because it puts him in New York and Pepper in California for what looks like it's going to be at least six months out of the year. He not so subtly suggests that Stark Industries's base of operations be moved to New York, but Pepper vetoes the idea as 'too disruptive'. Maybe that hurts a little, but he doesn't let on, just continues with his daily torrent of gossip and complaints when they speak on the phone.

“-and Thor is so _loud_. He woke me up at five am, because it'd started snowing; I mean, this guy has seen snow before, Frost Giants, hello? But he was like, 'the snow is most magnificent in the twilight, Tony, before your Midgardian motorised vehicles turn it to slush' and Steve just encouraged this behaviour by not telling him to shut the fuck up and go back to bed. _And_ it's October, it's way too early for snow. I suspect Loki has something to do with this.”

Pepper laughs quietly, her 'I'm finding your ridiculousness cute' laugh (over the years, he's learnt to discern the meanings behind her non-verbal cues, since this is what they used to trade in; telling each other how they feel is a relatively new phenomenon). “And how's Steve?” she asks.

“He's, you know, Steve; he's all gung-ho about Loki's rehab, thinks it's a great.”

“And you don't?”

“I don't know, he did try to kill his father, kill his brother, and destroy Asgard, so...”

“Hm,” she hums, and he knows he's in for it now. “You're getting judgemental in your old age.”

“'Old age'! I could beat any of these guys' asses! Except Natasha, because she's a girl, and she'd kill me, but still.”

“Of course you could,” Pepper reassures, her words light. He cradles the phone closer to his ear and bites back the wave of homesickness that's starting to ebb in. It's a new sort of feeling; he's never been homesick before, not on summers banished to the Hamptons to be out from under his father's feet, not at boarding school, not at the camp for Exceptionally Gifted Children, certainly not at MIT, and never in his adult life. But then, he dragged Pepper after him wherever he went, so there was really never a need.

“Uh,” he stammers, and forces himself to chuckle a little. “So when are you, uh, coming back to New York? Because I need another person on my snowball team, it's just me and Steve against the rest of them.”

She knows what he means, even if he does couch it in his usual rambling terms; it makes him feel uncomfortable and exposed. “As soon as I can.”

“Well, yeah, good. Steve misses you.”

“I know he does,” she replies softly.

-

Mornings at the shooting range are chaos. Clint and Natasha flirt over their weapons of choice in an increasingly perverted manner (and this is Tony thinking this; Steve can't even look at them when they get going), Thor and Clint and sometimes – okay, most of the time – Tony trash talk each other (Thor's insults are particularly florid and fancy), Bruce tries to hide, Steve tries to actually practice, and Coulson mutters under his breath when he thinks they can't hear him.

It's also an outdoor range, and it is as cold as _fuck_ ; Tony stamps his feet to keep circulation  
going as Thor and Clint bicker. He can feel Steve at his back, having surreptitiously moved forward until he's pressed against Tony. Tony's pretty sure that they're fooling no one.

“Are you gonna take the shot, take the shot, Thor,” Clint says, standing almost shoulder to shoulder with Thor as Thor aims for the paper man. “Or did they not teach you that in Norse God school?”

“I am familiar with primitive projectile weapons,” Thor says, “though they are considered quaint.”

“Yeah, well, see if you can _quaintly_ hit the target between the eyes.”

“In the court of Odin, I would be within my rights to hit _you_ between the eyes,” Thor says, and pushes Clint away. He stumbles into Steve, who grips him by the shoulder and pulls him up.

Thor's shot goes wide, just hitting the edge of the outline's head.

Clint pulls his gloves with a flourish, grinning. “That would not effectively put down an assailant. Worst you've got there is an earache.” He takes the gun from Thor and aims for the target. “Head,” he says, one bullet ripping through the head, “heart,” another bullet dead centre between imaginary ribs, “special area,” aimed at where the target's crotch would be. He blows on the muzzle of the gun and spins around.

There's a crack of thunder overhead. He grins even wider. “Aw, don't take it so hard, Thor, we can't all be good at everything.”

“You are a most aggravating little man,” Thor says, hefting Mjölnir over his shoulder. Clint pulls a face, but there's touch of real fear in there, too.

“Let someone else have a turn,” Coulson calls. Tony jumps; he'd forgotten Coulson was even there, the guy melts into the background so well. “Mr Stark? Why don't you go next?”

Tony looks round at Steve, reluctantly moving away from his warmth. “So, uh, I don't know how to use a gun. Show me?”

Steve narrows his eyes. “I think you probably do.”

He's right, his father took it upon himself to teach Tony how to fire a gun when he was thirteen as part of a father/son bonding thing that covered camping, fishing (both of which they were terrible at and hated every moment of), and rebuilding cars from the junk yard. He still remembers how good it felt to see those small signs of approval at him being gifted in the same way Howard was, even if Tony was failing English, History, Spanish, and anything else that didn't involve equations or his hands.

He doesn't need to tell Steve that, though.

“Please?”

“Oh, for God's sake,” Clint mutters, handing him the gun. “That is honestly the oldest trick in the book.”

Tony lets the gun hang from one gloved finger, turning wide eyes on Steve until Steve rubs a hand over his face and laughs. He pushes Tony over to the space recently vacated by Clint under Coulson's disapproving glare, and presses his right arm along Tony's, forcing him to stretch it out. Steve doesn't exactly tower over him, but Tony feels enveloped by him with Steve at his back again, arm curled around his. It's a pleasant feeling, almost worryingly so; he maybe leans into Steve more than strictly necessary, but Steve doesn't mention it.

“Take your gloves off,” he tells Tony.

“Do I have to?”

“Yeah, kind of.”

Tony sighs deeply, pulling one off, then the other, idly juggling the gun from hand to hand. “Okay, now what?” He looks over his shoulder at Steve, who is so close that he could rest his chin there.

“Hold it properly.”

“Aren't I?” He holds the gun loosely, muzzle pointed towards the ground, the edge of the grip pressed into his palm.

“If you try to shoot like that, you'll blow your hand off.”

He pushes back harder against Steve. “ _Just_ my hand?” To his surprise, Steve presses forward into him – just a little, he could put it down to Steve repositioning himself, if he didn't know better – and sighs.

“Hold it properly,” he repeats firmly. Tony gets a better grip, and tilts the barrel up, resting his index finger carefully on the trigger. “Okay, now move your feet apart.” He kicks gently at Tony's feet until they're wide enough apart.

“Kinky,” Tony says. In the background he can hear Clint's 'oh, come _on_ already'.

“Find your target,” Steve continues. His fingers on Tony's wrist urge him to lift the gun a little. “Breathe out, and pull back on the trigger.”

Tony exhales, a cloud of white obscuring his view for a second.

“Now,” Steve murmurs, lips just barely brushing against his ear. The gun goes off accidentally, missing any part of the target by a wide margin, the recoil sending Tony stumbling back into Steve.

“Fuck!” Tony swears. He looks back at Steve, who's biting his lip, face screwed up; he really has the world's worst poker face. “You did that on purpose!” At Steve's twitching cheek, he shakes his head. “I've created a monster.”

“Rich prep school kid can't shoot a gun, so shocking,” Clint says. “How about you leave the heavy lifting to the big boys while you play with yourself. I mean, by yourself,” he adds lazily.

Steve cracks up at this, hiding his face behind his hand and earning himself a punch in the shoulder from Tony. There was a time not so long ago when Steve would have been embarrassed by the frankly shoddy sexual innuendo. Now, though, he just laughs along with the rest of them. Tony can't say that hearing Steve laugh doesn't make him happy, but would a little more loyalty kill him?

“How about...” Tony starts, casting his eyes about until they fall on Clint's crossbow where its leant against the chain link fence. “A wager. I bet I can hit at least the red ring on your little dartboard over there.” He nods his head at Clint's extra special archery target.

“Yeah, right. I guess a fool and his money really are soon parted,” Clint says. “What're the stakes?”

“If I win, you give me that five grand back?”

Clint shrugs. “Don't have it any more.”

“That was like three months ago. You spent five thousand dollars in three months? You don't even pay rent or buy your own food!”

“Says the guy who spends five grand in an hour.”

“Okay.” Tony pretends to think hard about it, then says, “How about a night with Nat-- wait, it's joke, don't kill me,” he tags on to the end as Natasha takes one menacing step forward. “You'd make Steve sad if you killed me.”

“For Steve,” she concedes, and steps back. Steve thanks her quietly, still not quite having got his laughter under control.

“Okay, if I win I get custody of the bow for two weeks and you have to be the alpha tester for my suit's new upgrades. If I lose, I'll give you one of my cars, whichever you want.” He picks the crossbow up, turning it over in his hands just to see the look of pain of Clint's face.

The thought of Tony's cars is too much, though, it seems. “I'll take that bet.”

Tony swings the crossbow up, and swiftly nocks an arrow, then turns to the side and lines up his shot, before glancing at Clint, who's starting to look a little green. He pulls back on the bow and lets it go, saying a silent prayer that he isn't going to look like a idiot twice in five minutes.

It hits the outer edge of the red ring, and Tony lets out a long breath, a white cloud unfurling in front of him. “Rich prep school kids do archery instead of football,” he informs Clint. “So shocking.”

“It's-- it's almost out!” Clint cries. “It's on the line between red and blue, that's totally not a win!”

“Why don't we just let Dad decide for us,” Tony suggests, nodding at Coulson. Coulson sighs, but tramps across the frozen grass, hands buried in his coat pockets. He inspects the target for a long moment, looking at it from every angle.

“Red,” he calls eventually.

Tony high fives Thor, who almost knocks Tony on his ass but for Steve being there to catch him, one arm folded to his side to steady him. Neither of them pull away.

“It appears,” Thor says, pulling himself up to his most grand pose, “that a fool and his crossbow are also soon parted.”

-

Tony takes the crossbow everywhere with him, to every meeting and every outing and every movie night. He names it Mandy and starts singing Barry Manilow's _Mandy_ at any given opportunity.

“You know, I haven't had sex in a week and a half,” Natasha tells him one day, having pulled him aside in the gym, “so I hope you're enjoying yourself.”

“Immensely,” he replies, then makes the mistake of agreeing to spar with her. He can't open his left eye for several hours after that. Steve does take it upon himself to nurse Tony back to health, though, so, really, it's still a win.

-

The next couple of weeks are extremely busy for everyone but Tony: Clint and Natasha are whisked away in the middle of the night for some shady unsanctioned operation, Bruce gets time off for good behaviour and goes to visit Betty, Thor spends hours at the prison that holds his brother, working with Loki, and Steve has been volunteered to train S.H.I.E.L.D. military liaisons.

Which leaves Tony with the run of the tower all day. It's not as fun as he thought it would be. Mostly he just works on upgrades for his suit and tries to make some headway with that goddamn Tesseract, which no one – not even Loki – fully understands. Sometimes he video-conferences with Selvig, but mostly he's on his own, poring over his father's notes, seized HYDRA reports, and shit loads of Norse mythology. He hasn't worked this hard since... ever. MIT was a breeze compared to this.

“Are you okay?”

Tony starts, looking up at where Steve is standing over him, holding a glass of something – milk. Of course. He glances around, aware that he's as twitchy as hell, thanks to the seemingly bottomless supply of coffee in this place. He finds that he's still in the kitchen, every inch of the table in front of him covered in pieces of paper; he'd dragged his shit in here so that he could keep working while he made lunch, he hadn't meant to stay.

“Huh? Oh, uh.” His mouth tastes bitter and gross. He reaches for the coffee maker that he helpfully brought over from the kitchen counter earlier on, hair of the dog and all that, and Steve swiftly removes his cup. “Oh,” he says, crestfallen, as Steve puts it out of reach. “What time is it?”

“After eleven,” Steve says.

“In the... evening?” he asks. He's going to be in so much trouble if it's the morning.

“Yeah, Tony,” Steve replies, his eyebrows drawing together in a worried frown. “When was the last time you took a break?”

“Um.” Tony rakes a hand through his hair, and he's pretty sure it sticks that way. “I had lunch at, like, three? So, three.”

Steve raises his eyebrows. “Eight hours?”

“I just-- I'm kind of almost--” He can't verbalise it, and as he looks down at his notes now, they're already starting to blur and turn into meaningless squiggles, but he's _almost there_ ; he can feel the revelation around the corner, if only he keeps going. He waves his hands around in an effort to make Steve understand.

“You need to go to bed,” Steve says.

“I can't, I just, I've almost got it, okay? Anyway, I'm way too caffeinated to sleep.”

“You don't have to sleep, Tony,” Steve says, and gives him a long look.

“I- I can't. I can do this, I'm gonna do this.”

Steve heaves a sigh. “Okay. Good night, Tony,” he says, and leaves the room. Tony waits a couple of minutes, then gets up and rescues his coffee cup.

-

He gets, maybe, ten hours sleep in the next four days, and he's pretty sure this is how zombie apocalypses start: loss of fine motor control, constant gnawing hunger, inability to put words in the correct order, although Jane and Selvig can follow him just fine. He's pretty sure they've created a new language, one that sends Steve's eyebrows up into his hairline.

This is the closest anyone has _ever_ got to understanding this cube. Fucking Einstein couldn't work it out. Tony's notes are running into the thousands now, filling up numerous notebooks and loose pages, mostly written a newly invented code so that he could get everything down faster.

If he could just... just get to the centre of this thing, then all of it would unravel and he'd _get_ it. Everyday that he can't is a fresh disappointment.

He holes up in his shared lab, avoiding Steve when he's there, which isn't often, and the place is so _lonely_ sometimes that he can't stand it and has to download complete albums of incomprehensible metal to blast on the speakers.

Pepper is neck deep in meetings. “Hammer Industries is stealing our contracts and manufacturers left and right,” she says tensely on the phone, while he's staring at a white board full of equations.

“Oh,” he replies, and rolls his chair closer to the board to scrutinise it. There's something... off about it.

“S.H.I.E.L.D. had to release Hammer after the federal government leaned on them,” she continues. “Or at least, that's what I've heard around the water cooler... Tony? Tony, are you still there?”

“Yeah...” He grabs a cloth and starts to wipe the board clean. He's just going to have to start from scratch. All this is nonsense; he'll have to contact Jane and Erik and start over – that'll be another all-nighter.

“Are you... drinking?” she asks, the hesitation clear in her voice. “Like before?”

He shakes his head, then belatedly realises that she can't see him. “No, I don't know where alcohol- I don't even know if there is any... Thor drinks a lot...”

“Okay,” she replies, “because Steve says you've been pretty out of it for the past week. I-” There's a loud beep on her end, and she pauses, then answers it quietly before swearing. “Damn it. Tony, I have to- I have to go. I love you. Okay? Tony?”

“Love you too, Pep,” he replies vaguely, as reaches for the top left corner of the board with a pen in hand, phone wedged between his ear and his shoulder.

-

Steve gives up trying to get him to rejoin society somewhere around day seven. Distantly, Tony thinks that maybe they've had a fight – or what would have been a fight if he'd checked in long enough to have it with Steve. As it is, Steve leaves a plate of sandwiches on the desk and slams the door really hard when he leaves.

That was a while ago. Now Tony's playing some fucking awful music on the lab's speakers, programming new imaging software, because there's nothing currently on Earth that can accurately depict the molecular structure of the Tesseract.

“Anthony!”

Tony glances over his shoulder; Thor's standing in the doorway, looking like he's been trying to get his attention for a while, judging by how Dummy is poking at him. Tony cuts the music.

“Knock it off, Dummy, Thor's not about to spontaneously combust.”

Dummy rolls back a couple of inches, and Thor edges around him. “Thank you, Anthony,” he says.

Tony grunts and turns back to the computer.

“You... type very fast,” Thor comments after a moment of silence.

“Hundred and fifty words per minute. What do you want, Thor? If you've broken something, call Coulson. I'm busy.”

“No, I just wished to...” Thor pauses, and Tony doesn't look up, even though it seems like one of those heavy pauses that you're supposed to look up for. “You are pining for your betrothed.”

Tony stares at the lines of code sweeping across his screen. He doesn't say anything. Thor sighs.

“I miss Jane,” Thor says. It's probably the most straightforward thing he's ever said. Tony looks at him out of the corner of his eye. “I know how it feels, to be separated from your beloved, though Jane and I do not share the bond of you and Ms. Potts. Perhaps soon.”

“Right,” Tony says.

“But...” Thor frowns, seeming to be picking his words carefully. One for the history books, clearly. “You are not alone. Steve worries after you, and so do I.”

Tony takes a breath and snaps his eyes back to the screen. “Kinda busy here, big guy. If you wanna talk about your feelings, maybe you should go find Coulson. I suspect that he moonlights as an agony uncle,” he says, wringing every last bit sarcasm out of himself.

Thor claps a hand on his shoulder and gives it a squeeze. “I will bother you no longer. I wish you glad tidings in your endeavours.”

“Thanks,” Tony mutters, but Thor's already swept out of the door. Dummy rolls forward and pokes Tony in the side of the head.

“Shut up, Dummy.”

-

“...Tony, Tony, Tony.” At some point he realises that the voice isn't in his head, but he continues to ignore it. Until he's smacked in the side of the head, that is.

“What the fuck?” he cries, rolling his chair away from his attacker, rubbing his ear before looking around.

Rhodey stares at him sternly. “Get up,” he says.

“What are you doing here?”

“Staging an intervention, apparently. Up.” He drags Tony's chair back towards him, and begins to tip it forward. Tony scrambles out of it, catching sight of Steve standing by the door, arms crossed over his chest.

“What are you, what--?” Tony asks lamely as Rhodey grips the back of his neck firmly and steers him away from his desk.

“I have it on good authority, you haven't been sleeping, or eating, or bathing, and you don't even want to have sex. So. This is Christmas of 1988 bad.”

“Ugh,” Tony replies. They'd made a pact to never to mention that Christmas again. Three days in a New Brunswick prison cell, a stomach pumping, and his dad's _face_ are memories he'd really like to pack away and never see again. “What're you doing?”

“ _I_ am skipping out on my responsibilities as a Lieutenant Colonel of the United States Air Force to deal with your sorry ass, and I'm doing it while jetlagged. _You_ are going to sleep for at least twelve hours.”

“Caffeine,” Tony says, waving vaguely at the table. “Drunk enough to keep an elephant awake for _days_.”

“Steve switched it out for decaf this morning. And I have really strong sleeping pills with me.”

“Traitor,” Tony hisses as Rhodey hustles him out the door past Steve. Steve looks at his feet and smiles.

-

When he wakes the next (morning, afternoon, evening?) whenever, it takes him several long minutes to work out where he is. He's face down in a scratchy pillow, so nothing new there, his head is pounding, also not surprising, and it feels like he's run a marathon, his muscles ache so much. This is all pretty normal fare for him; he wonders how much he had to drink last night, and, for one stomach-churning moment, what he did and who he possibly did it with.

And then the rest of his brain switches on and he remembers Steve's stupid face and Rhodey pissed off face and all the coffee. Ugh, how could coffee do this to him? He thought they were friends.

After a couple of false starts, he manages to get up and stumble into the shower, where he stays for the next half an hour until his skin stops feeling sticky. He 'd have stayed in there all day if it wasn't for a sudden insistent hunger that makes him dress hastily and head for the kitchen, which turns out to be even less stocked than normal.

“Fucking Thor,” he says to himself as he closes the last empty cupboard door. That man eats everything – goddamn Aesir biology.

“Pizza do you?” Rhodey asks.

Tony turns around and narrows his eyes at him. “You're still here?”

“Well, I had to cash in some of my leave, and I'm in the Avengers Tower, what am I gonna do? Check in to the Holiday Inn? I played _Mortal Kombat_ with Thor earlier on.” A smile breaks through Rhodey's pissy face, and Tony returns it. Sometimes he forgets that Rhodey really doesn't get to experience all of this with him.

“What kind of pizza you got?”

“Ham and pineapple.” He drops the box on the table, and Tony wrinkles his nose.

“You know how I feel about fruit on savoury food.”

“Well, since you can't get deliveries to a building that doesn't officially exist, I had to go out and buy this, and I'm not going back out in _that_ again.” He nods to the window, where a blizzard is making its presence known.

“Such a good friend,” Tony mutters, but sits at the table nevertheless. “So, uh. Was what you took leave from important?”

“Just liberating a small Eastern European country. Nothing so important as babysitting the great Tony Stark.”

“Yeah,” Tony says, and focuses on picking the pineapple pieces off one half of the pizza. “Did Pepper call you?”

“No, Steve did.”

“Really?”

“I _know_.” Rhodey breaks into a full on grin at this. “Captain Fucking America on the phone for me, I practically wet myself.”

“Steve has that effect on people.”

“Yeah,” Rhodey agrees, a little dreamily, if you ask Tony.

He takes a bite of the pizza. It's cold and dry and overcooked, but it's food and how did he forget how much he liked food? “I should probably call Erik, he's expecting me to email him my shit or something.”

Rhodey snaps back into serious-Rhodey mode. “I took care of it. I told Drs. Selvig and Foster that you're not allowed to play with them for at least a month. And that is on Pepper's orders.”

“I'm not a child, you know.”

Rhodey looks at Tony's neatly stacked pile of pineapple slices. “Eat your fruit.”

-

Rhodey leaves in the afternoon, after having thoroughly tested out the new suit Tony's building for him. He announces that his superhero name is going to be 'War Machine', and Tony cringes, remembering the fight that inspired it. Rhodey ignores his guilty look and blithely says that it's a cooler name than 'Iron Man, most of it isn't even made out of iron' and then they argue about it for several minutes.

When Thor and Steve get back, Thor insists that Tony play _Mortal Kombat_ with him, as he is 'a more worthy adversary than Colonel Rhodes', while Steve pulls lots of appalled faces at the screen and soon heads off to bed.

“I, too, am going to retire to my chambers,” Thor announces to the room a little while later. He claps his hand on Tony's shoulder and gives him a shake. “Tomorrow I shall destroy your pixelated avatar.”

“You can try,” Tony calls back happily.

He thinks about sneaking back to his research, but Coulson boxed up and took most of it away earlier and he doubts that he could now fathom anything that he wrote in the past week. There's a certain mindset that goes with laws-of-physics-breaking scientific discoveries, and it's dangerously close to a nervous breakdown. It's been years since that's happened to him; either he got it on the first attempt, or he gave up and got drunk.

He's pretty sure that this experience doesn't _actually_ count as personal growth.

When he finally tears himself away from an Elvira marathon, at close to two am, he shuffles off to his bedroom. The tower is completely silent but for the occasional snore coming from the direction of Thor's room. He doesn't miss Clint, Natasha, and Bruce, per se, but he appreciates the constant level of noise that Clint, at least, keeps up. Tony's always hated silence, and there's only so much NPR one can listen to of a night.

As he passes by Steve's room, he stops. There's no light coming from under the door and, knowing Steve, him and his glass of milk probably went to sleep at ten pm on the dot. For some reason, the thought of that makes him want to wake Steve up. He makes it a couple more steps before shaking his head and turning around. He shouldn't, but screw it, Steve never stays mad at him for long.

He opens the door as quietly as he can, wondering how far he can make it into the room before Steve wakes up.

He has one foot inside the door when he hears, “Tony? What's wrong?” a controlled note of panic in Steve's voice.

One day, Tony _will_ successfully creep up on Steve. And that'll be the day Steve accidentally breaks his jaw, but it'll be worth it.

“Oh, uh.” He can make out Steve squinting at him in the dark, propped up on one elbow. Shyness is not a natural of quality of Starks, so he closes the door behind him gently, and says, “I'm sleeping in here tonight.”

“Okay,” Steve replies, and scoots over in his tiny bed until his shoulder touches the wall. Tony strips out of his pants and gets in, moving around to try and find a comfortable position in this hideous S.H.I.E.L.D.-issue cot. Finally he rolls over onto his stomach and throws an arm over Steve's chest.

“A grown man can't sleep in a single bed,” he says, muffled as he buries his face in Steve's collarbone. “Tomorrow I'm taking you to Macy's and we're getting you the biggest bed they have.”

“Do I have a choice?” Steve asks, laughing a little.

“No.”

“Okay then,” he says, and settles an arm against Tony's waist.

-

Everyone is very... gentle with him, afterwards. The rest of the team starts filtering back in in the following days; when Natasha sees him, the first thing she does is smile something approximating sweetly, and the second thing she does is glare at Clint, who stumbles over his greeting. “So yeah, if you want to-- with the armor? We can test that out, when you're... ready. I'm good for... tonight... tomorrow... whenever.”

Bruce asks him if he could help out with some of Bruce's experiments. “Don't worry, I won't inject you with anything,” he says, and smiles.

Thor makes sure they play every video game there is at the Tower together, occasionally booming, “You are extremely talented at this pursuit, Anthony!”

Coulson _compliments_ his work.

By the end of the week, he's thoroughly freaked out. It's okay when Steve treats him like he's delicate, because he treats everyone like that, and it just means more making out and more cuddling in bed. (In Tony's quarters, because Steve never did get that bed. When Tony showed him it online, Steve baulked at the price.

“I'm spending hundreds of thousands of dollars developing a bike for you,” Tony said, “but you won't let me drop a couple of grand on a bed?”

“That's different.” Steve leant over him, capturing the mouse to close the window. “I want the bike.”)

When Fury marches through the kitchen door a couple of weeks later, Tony only barely resists the urge to dive for cover, frozen with a cup of coffee halfway to his mouth. “You aren't going to hug me, are you?”

Fury turns his beady eye on Tony. “I don't know where you've been,” he says, then pauses. “How are you, Tony?”

Tony does dive for cover this time, ducking under the kitchen table with his cup. “Begone imposter, and take your dark magic with you!” he yells.

“I'm looking for Cap,” Fury replies, unfazed.

Tony risks a look over the top of the table. “He's in the gym,” he says, narrowing his eyes.

“Thank you,” Fury says, and almost sounds sincere. There's less barely concealed disgust than usual, at least. Tony stays hunkered down under the table as Fury's footsteps recede, accompanied by a quiet chuckle. Once he's sure that Fury's gone, he shifts to get up, spilling his coffee, hot liquid splashing on his jeans and all over the floor.

“Shit,” he mutters, putting the cup on the ground and twisting around to grab the kitchen roll off the counter. Good thing he'd been nursing that coffee for a while, or he would be in some serious pain. He wipes his jeans off as best he can, then gets onto his knees to clean the rest of the spill.

“Hey, are you--” Tony looks up from blotting the floor. Clint is bent at the waist, peering at him with faint horror. “Fury said I should come check on you. Why are you under the table? Do I need to get Steve?”

“Yeah, I need a big, strong man to lift this heavy, heavy cup for me,” he says. He gets up and throws the tissues away. “What is wrong with you?”

“I think the question is: what is wrong with _you_?” Clint has a faint sheen of sweat covering his face, he's probably just come from sparring with Steve. The bruises would seem to attest to that.

“I'm good. Better than you'll ever be, anyway.”

Clint makes a sharp noise of disgust in the back of his throat. “See, this is what I get for trying to be nice to you,” he says.

“Yeah well, why are you trying to be nice to me?”

Clint's face grows serious and upset. “Steve emotionally blackmailed us...”

“Oh, with the big eyes and long silent stare?” Tony nods, snagging his cup from the floor and setting it in the sink. “He does that.”

“Did you teach him to do that?”

Tony laughs. “Do you think I'm capable of being sweet and innocent and lovable?”

“No,” Clint replies, a little too quickly. At least pretend to think about it. Jesus. “So, you _aren't_ going nuts?”

“Not any more than usual.”

“Okay, okay.” Clint nods to himself, then turns around, staring at the door. “I'm gonna go.”

Tony smirks and waits until Clint is almost out of hearing range. “Oh, Cliiint,” he calls.

After a beat, Clint replies, “What?”

“My upgrades are ready.”

Clint reappears at the door. “No, I was only doing that because I thought you'd cry otherwise. This talk-- we're-- I'm done being nice to you, we're back to normal now.”

“Can't go back on a gentleman's agreement, Bugeye.”

He waves a finger at Tony. “You're not a gentleman and neither am I.”

Tony stares at him, less the sad and doleful Steve stare, and more the 'I'm gonna cut a bitch' Natasha stare. He's been practising it. “I'm gonna strap a jetpack to you at some point, Crosseye, there's no running from it.”

“No, no--” Clint backs out down the hall, pursued by Tony. “I'll-- I will tell Phil.”

“It's going to happen!” Tony shouts as Clint turns tail and flees.

He gets a couple of seconds to stand triumphant before Thor roars, “Mario Kart!” from the other end of the hallway, and advances on him looking like he has every intention of picking Tony up and taking him bodily to the Wii.

-

Playing video games with Thor makes Tony even more edgy and frustrated: the guy has ridiculous muscle memory and has already beaten Tony's high score three times over. Five hours after Thor collars him, he escapes, leaving Thor with Clint and Thor's fervent promise that he will 'destroy' the little man.

Steve is still in gym, sparring with Bruce, when Tony swings by to irritate him; he has Bruce's back pinned to his chest while Bruce pants and sweats profusely.

“Okay, now try to break my hold,” Steve's saying gently.

Tony leans against the door. “Do I need to pay to watch this, or...?”

Steve ignores him, but Bruce looks positively murderous. He tries to twist Steve's arm to little effect, tries to elbow him in the stomach, tries to roll and flip him over. Tony looks pointedly at his watch and sighs.

“I can't... Damn it,” Bruce mutters. “This just isn't happening, Steve.”

“Okay, okay,” Steve says. He lets go and backs off as Bruce quickly sheds his boxing gloves, ducks under the ropes, and storms out.

“Don't leave on my account,” Tony calls after him.

Steve grabs a towel and starts wiping his face. “Tony, that wasn't nice.”

“Got rid of him, didn't it?” He saunters up to the ring and pulls himself up onto the platform, grabbing the gloves as he goes. He waves them at Steve, grinning, before he slips them on.

“Let's not,” Steve says. “Come on, I'm tired.”

“No, you're not. It takes a lot more than that to tire you out,” he replies, turning his best bedroom eyes on Steve.

“You always accuse me of cheating!”

“That's because you always are cheating, the competition is inherently unfair with your... enhancements.” He pushes Steve lightly in the shoulder. “Doesn't mean I don't want to try, though.”

Steve rolls his eyes. “Fine. Put the body armour on,” he says, pointing to where it's hanging on the wall along with a helmet.

“Do I have to? It's uncomfortable,” Tony whines, but ducks under the ropes anyway – when Captain America tells you to do something, you do it.

“Yes, otherwise I'll just pound you into the mat.”

Tony pulls the vest over his head. “I'd be okay with that.”

“Not like _that_ ,” Steve says, and eyes him irritably as Tony gets back into the ring. “Okay, keep your fists up and spread your feet. I know you know how to do this, Happy told me.”

“Well, you're just getting to be a regular Chatty Cathy, huh?” Tony snipes, but Steve's also getting pretty good at ignoring him when he wants to, and he's super serious about training. The next ten minutes pass in the relative silence of blow after blow landing, mostly on Tony. Steve's moves start to get a little fancy, flipping, and tripping, and twisting Tony's arms at alarming angles. It's extremely arousing.

“You have _got_ to stop--” He just manages to stumble out of the path of Steve's fist, ducking around him. “--training with Natasha so much.”

“Why?” Steve spins around and drops to a crouch, sweeping his arm out to catch Tony behind the knees and bring him down. “She's a good teacher.”

“That's--” He scrambles up, taking a moment to catch his breath. “That's what I'm worried about! Just don't do the legs around the neck thing, okay? Pretty sure you'd strangle me.”

“I promise I won't strangle you with my legs,” he says, and then goes through a series of moves that Tony can't even begin to fathom, which culminate with Tony's face pressed into the mat, Steve's foot between his shoulder blades. “Yield?”

Tony replies with something along the lines of, “Hnnh.” Steve presses down a little harder, and Tony groans.

“I'm going to take that as a yes. Do you want a hand up?”

“I, uh--” He shifts a little as the pressure of Steve's foot disappears, and instantly misses it. Yeah, this is definitely arousing. “I just need a minute.” He rests his cheek against the mat, only resisting the urge to bury his face in it with the thoughts of all the feet that have walked on it. He's okay with Natasha's lady feet, and Steve, obviously, but ugh, _Clint_.

Steve sits down next to him, stretching his legs out. He looks like a big kid. “Tony, are you okay?”

“Everything's just a little... hard right now,” Tony mumbles.

“No, I mean...” Steve puts his stubbornly sincere face on. “I know things have been kind of rough for you lately.”

“Oh.” He crosses his arms in front of him and rests his chin there. “That. Yeah, I'm good. You can stop intimidating everyone to be nice to me. Thor won't leave me along about Super Mario now.”

Steve smiles, but it doesn't quite relieve his worried expression. “I didn't tell Thor to do that. He just really likes those games. Look, I know you miss Pepper.”

“Yeah, of course I do, yeah--” He takes a breath and allows “Every fucking day,” to slip out quietly.

“You wish she was in New York,” Steve says.

“Yeah, yeah...” He glances away, and Steve lays a warm hand on his back. “But I've got you, and you're nothing to be sniffed at, right?” He does his level best to keep from letting the 'right' sound shaky and pathetic.

“I'm definitely not,” Steve replies lightly, hand trailing to the base of Tony's neck. “But Pepper's... Pepper, isn't she? I mean, it hurts to be away from your... person.” He says it softly, and Tony wonders if he's thinking about Bucky, or maybe Peggy (god help Tony if it's Howard, seriously).

“Hey.” He pushes himself up into a sitting position, taking hold of Steve's hand on his neck to pull Steve's arm around his shoulders. He gives him a good hard poke in the ribs. “You're my person too.”

“Yeah, and you're my...” Steve blushes pink. “Yeah,” he mumbles.

-

By November, the National Weather Service is putting out severe weather warnings for New York daily; weathermen are making up ever more ridiculous names for the unexplained cold spell.

“You need to do something about your brother, Thor!” Tony yells as he ducks in the door behind Steve, shielding his face from the blizzard as best he can. They'd been attempting to use New York's misery to their advantage and train for harsher climates, but sometime between the S.H.I.E.L.D. issue SUV coming to a dead stop on the way to the range, necessitating that Tony heat up several bottles of water with jumper cables and his arc reactor just to clean the layer of ice off the engine, and Clint's hands getting stuck to the metal bar of his crossbow, Coulson actually capitulated to their complaints and agreed that this was akin to torture.

The scientists, as of yet, have been unable to work out how to dampen Loki's powers of weather manipulation. Tony once suggested that Odin should just zap them out of him, but Thor did not respond well to this. Apparently enforced mortality is a sore point for Asgardians.

“I shall kill him,” Thor says gravely, wrestling with his heavy winter armour. Steve unwinds the scarf from around his neck, revealing red cheeks and a red nose, then moves to help Thor lift the armour off.

“Fratricide? What kind of influences have I left you with?” Pepper's voice drifts into the hallway, followed quickly by Pepper herself.

“Pep!” Tony bounds up to her as best he can in snow boots. “I missed you,” he says in a rush, wrapping his arms around her, pressing a kiss to her neck.

“Tony! You're like an icicle!” she exclaims, but returns the hug just as hard as him. He buries his face in her collarbone, holding her still for a moment. He just-- it's just been so long since he's seen her, weeks and weeks. Someone clears their throat awkwardly – it sounds like Clint – and he steels himself to let go of her. She smiles and brushes some stray snow out of his hair.

Steve succeeds in freeing Thor from his armour, and Thor stands victorious, while static electricity makes his long blond hair float around his head like a halo. Steve covers his laughter with a cough; Thor looks momentarily concerned for his friend's health, oblivious.

“Lady Pepper,” he says. “I shall do my utmost to prevent Tony from falling into dishonour.” He pauses. “Further dishonour.”

“ _Lady_ Pepper,” she repeats, resting her chin on Tony's shoulder. “I could get used to that.”

-

“Is it always like this?” she asks later, curled up next to him on the couch, watching as Clint and Thor's rough-housing turns more and more violent. They've already broken two lamps and put an elbow-sized dent in the drywall.

“Worse, normally. At least Natasha hasn't got involved yet.”

Natasha sits in one of the armchairs, tapping at her laptop, occasionally lifting her eyes to check on them; if they get out of control, Tony's pretty sure that she'll put them down with her pinky.

“How long are you staying this time?” he asks Pepper, trying to keep his tone light. Steve raises his eyebrows at him, on the other side of Pepper. He's sitting close enough to her that their knees are touching, but he's still skittish about PDA; it's not like this thing isn't common knowledge by now, but Steve likes to believe that everyone's as innocent as he is.

“A little while,” she says. “I arranged all my meetings to be done over the phone.”

“Cool,” he says, tightening his arm around her. “So, where're you staying?”

She looks up at him, her mouth pressed into a straight line. “Where are _you_ staying?”

“Here, I guess?” But Pepper likes order and he doubts that she wants to manage six unruly superheroes.

“Well then,” she says, looking back at Thor and Clint as they put a crack in the coffee table.

“You guys should go back to your house,” Steve says.

“Huh?”

“Tony, you're going stir crazy in here.”

“Yeah, but--”

“I saw men lose it in the war,” Steve continues. “It wasn't pretty.”

Whenever Steve invokes The War card, Tony knows he's serious about something. “But you're here,” he says quietly, suddenly wishing the others would clear out.

“I can look after myself better than you can,” Steve counters.

“Doubtful.”

Pepper lays a hand on his chest, just beneath the arc reactor. “I'm sure he'll visit. You're allowed out on your own, right?”

Steve smiles. “Sometimes.”

“Then Tony can come home with me, and you can visit, and we will not have a repeat of the Tesseract incident.”

Pepper and Steve totally ignore Tony as the agree on what to do with him. It's decided that the next day they'll pack up whatever crap Tony wants to bring with him (mostly research that will be carefully vetted before leaving the tower), and he and Pepper will move back into his Park Avenue house; Steve promises to visit a couple of days later. The way they're talking about it, it sounds like it's sort of a permanent thing. Tony decides that he doesn't want to be disabused of that idea, and lets them hash out the details as if he wasn't there.

-

“Are you okay?” Pepper asks. She's wearing soft-looking sweatpants, and a camisole just the wrong side of sheer for his liking. Her feet are bare, toes buried in the plush carpet, and there's an StarkPhone held loosely in her hand.

“You've asked me that three times already,” he says. He plumps the couch cushion next to him. “Come sit down?”

She flops down next to him. He reaches around her, and plucks the phone from her hand. “No more texting for you, young lady,” he says, and places it on the coffee table.

Her hair is pulled up into a ponytail, which brushes against his chest as she shifts for a more comfortable position. He twists his fingers around the elastic and tugs it. “You shouldn't wear your hair up so much,” he says, and grins when it comes free, cascading over her shoulders.

She tuts. “Men. If you had hair that reached past your shoulders, _you'd_ tie it back.”

“Thor doesn't. Well, he did once, but Clint laughed him out of the gym.”

“Hogun pulls it off,” she says.

“Oh yeah? You want a piece of that?” She's only met the Warriors Three once, when Tony mistakenly invited them to his birthday party. He learnt a valuable lesson that day: never tell an Aesir that your parties 'get kinda wild', they take it as a challenge. He's still finding bits of drywall in the pool.

“I wouldn't turn it down,” she says lightly.

“Aw, that's my girl,” he says. He twists around to kiss her, bending awkwardly until she pushes him down and slides onto his lap. It feels so damn good having her here in front of him that he stills for a moment, eyes closed, his hands circling her waist.

“Tony?” she asks, and he opens his eyes. She traces her fingers down his cheek and leans in for another, much longer, much dirtier kiss.

“Insatiable,” he murmurs against her. “You've ruined me, you know.”

“You were already ruined,” she says, drawing back far enough to slide her hands around his face. Her engagement ring catches the light in his peripheral vision.

“You're wearing the ring,” he says.

She runs her fingers through his hair. Tony's glad he stopped slicking it back, it feels so much better this way. “I always wear it. Everyday.”

“You don't like it,” he points out.

“I like it because you gave it to me.”

He laughs. “That is a crock. I've bought plenty of things for you that you've unabashedly hated. Remember the car?”

“That thing was a positive health hazard.” She unwinds her left hand from his hair, cradling his head with her right. She spreads her fingers between them. “This ring is you, and that's why I like it, even when I hate it.”

He doesn't say anything for what seems like a very long time to him. Pepper replaces her hand, tracing her nails lightly across his scalp. “That's... deep,” he says at last.

“Well, some of us can hold more than one thought in our head at a time.”

“Sounds stressful.” He leans in, biting down on her lower lip gently, hands beginning to wander up to the swell of her breasts. He gets as far as to ruck her camisole up when her phone buzzes on the table. “Leave it,” he says, when she turns her head to look at it. He kisses the bit of exposed skin behind her ear. “C'mon, it's late.”

“No, I have to--” Her hands leave his hair, her weight shifting off him even as he scrabbles to keep a grip on the slippery material of her top. “I have to take this, I'm sorry.” She kisses him on the forehead quickly, then jumps up and grabs the phone.

“Hello, is it...?” She cups the phone to her ear and waves at him before slipping out the door, making sure to close it behind her. Leaving him alone with the hum of the house and his newly arrived boner.

“I guess it's just you and me, huh?” he mutters.

-

Bruce is rarely seen out of his lab when he's not training, which leaves Tony little opportunity to irritate him, especially now that he's not there in the morning for a sneak attack when Bruce is collecting his funny smelling tea. He tries his best when they share work space, but Bruce has a whole array of deadly toxins, and Tony's death wish isn't quite that immediate.

So, when he sees him coming out of the gym, shoulders hunched, back turned to Tony, Tony pounces.

“Heeey, Bruce,” he calls, jogging after him. “Can't handle the heat?”

Bruce _growls_ , low and loud enough that Tony stops in his tracks, takes an instinctive step back. Bruce doesn't acknowledge Tony's presence any further, continuing down the hall until he's out of sight.

“Rude,” Tony mutters. “Talk to you later, then!”

He heads into the gym, grabbing a pair of boxing gloves off the hook as he goes. “Man, what did you do to him?” he calls out to Steve. When he doesn't answer, Tony turns around. The first thing he catches sight of is the blood, all over the floor, then Steve sitting on the edge of the boxing ring, holding a rapidly reddening wad of tissues to his face. The front of his t-shirt is similarly soaked.

“I'm fine,” Steve says, lowering the tissues for a moment, smiling for good measure. His lip is split and there's blood on his teeth; it does nothing to soothe Tony's concern.

“You are not-- fuck-- what is, what the fuck?” he splutters. “And Bruce just left you like this?”

He only just makes out Steve's answer as he walks across the room, muffled as it is by the tissues. “He got a bit... over stimulated. I told him to go cool off.”

“Let me see,” Tony says, batting Steve's hands away. He tries to remember what Pepper used to do when he got into scrapes. “Uh, tip your head back. I think it's broken, it looks broken.”

Steve curls his fingers around one of Tony's hands. “It's not broken,” he says. He sounds so gentle, like Tony's the one who needs comforting.

“Fuck, how would you know whether it's broken or not? Jesus. You need a doctor, we have one of those on call, right?”

Steve tugs Tony's hand down, and goes back to cleaning his face. “I know what a broken nose feels like. Look, it's already stopped bleeding.” He holds the bloodied tissue out as proof.

“You 'know what a broken nose feels like'? The hell does that mean? Goddamnit, get that out of my face.” He pushes Steve's outstretched arm away, and Steve's mouth twists into a stupid smile.

“I took worse beatings than this when I was twelve,” he says, and shrugs. “I'm fine.”

“You're bleeding out of your _face_ , and who says that, what the hell? Worse beatings when you were twelve? Fuck.”

Steve's eyebrows knit together as he watches Tony. He's so fucking _calm_ , it's creepy. He's from Brooklyn, he should be more upset when people hurt him, even if they don't mean to – Brooklyn taxi drivers go nuts when someone so much as cuts them off in traffic, right?

Steve brings his hands down on Tony's shoulders. “You're really upset about this, aren't you?”

“Yeah, okay,” he says, rolling his eyes. He doesn't step out of Steve's grip, though, and Steve looks like he's won something. “Urgh, I'll find you a new shirt while you clean up.”

He retreats to Steve's locker, for which he obviously has his own key, to grab a new t-shirt while Steve strips out of his bloodied one. He has hand-shaped bruises on his ribcage.

“Jesus, Steve,” Tony snaps, catching sight of them.

“What? Oh,” he says, looking down. “They don't hurt. Much.” He takes the offered t-shirt and puts it on before grabbing new a wad of tissues and kneeling to clean the floor.

Tony stands over him and sighs. “Pretty sure someone else can do that. Like, anyone else who hasn't just been pounded in the face.”

“Quit fussing, I'm fine,” he says, in a way all too similar to Tony when Pepper has a go at him for testing volatile new tech without supervision.

“Don't you take that tone with me, I _know_ what that tone means,” Tony replies, scowling at Steve as he stands up and lobs the tissues into the bin. Perfect aim, of course.

“Tony.” Steve takes one of his hands and tugs him towards the door. “I'm _fine_ , but I'm really hungry, so let's go get something to eat, okay? Okay?” He pulls on Tony's hand a little more, until his goofy smile and big eyes wear Tony down.

“We _are_ going to talk about this,” he warns, trailing after Steve.

Thor is already in the kitchen, making some kind of sandwich that looks in equal parts horrendous and delicious. He looks up when they enter and his face turns from what Tony can only describe as without-a-care-or-a-thought to serious in the blink of an eye.

“What have you done to him now, Anthony?” he says gravely, looking at the rapidly blossoming bruises underneath Steve's eyes. It's almost a relief to be spoken to like this again. Almost.

“What? I haven't done anything to him! Why do you guys always blame me for everything?”

Thor advances, and Steve shuffles in front of Tony a little, his shoulder overlapping with Tony's. “Because,” Thor says, “every time Steve is injured, it has something to do with you.”

Tony sucks in a sharp breath. “That is blatantly untrue, Natasha beats the crap out of him regularly. And you know what? I feel like I'm owed a little more respect than I get in this house. I am, after all, the oldest.”

Thor narrows his eyes. “I am several thousand of your Earth years old.”

Tony blows out a scornful sigh. “Yeah, but in Asgard terms you're, like, a teenager.”

“And in Midgard terms you are what I believe is referred to as a 'man-child',” Thor shoots back.

“I know you are, but what am I?” He tries to get up in Thor's face, but is stopped by Steve's hand on his chest. Steve's other hand is on Thor's chest, who politely rocks back, as if anything less than a hurricane could knock him over.

“Guys,” Steve says. “Quit it. Tony didn't do anything.”

“It was Bruce,” Tony adds petulantly.

“Dr Banner did such a thing to you?” Thor is already striding to the door. “I shall have words with him!”

“Hey, wait for me!” Tony calls, following him out.

“Guys, guys!” Steve catches up easily, grabbing Tony by the arm to stop him. “Just leave him alone, okay?”

“We shan't injure him too grievously,” Thor says, barely breaking his stride. Tony nods vigorously.

Steve presses his lips together in something perilously close to a pout. Tony's resolve wavers. “He's having a rough time, the last thing he needs right now is you two.”

“And the last thing you needed was to ruin another perfectly good t-shirt!” Tony says, poking him hard in the chest.

“Tony,” he whines, suddenly very close, his hand moving from Tony's arm to his waist. Seriously, he's created a monster. Goddamnit. He lets his head drop forward in defeat.

“Thor, heel,” he calls. Thor looks confused as he stops. “Fine, we'll leave him alone.”

Steve's face lights up.

“But we're telling Dad,” he finishes

Steve's face falls. “You hate talking to Coulson,” he counters.

Tony raises a finger. “Ah ah ah. That is the deal, otherwise I let Thor off the leash.”

Steve pouts some more, then sighs. “Okay, deal.”

“We are not going to avenge our somewhat fallen comrade?” Thor shifts from foot to foot, looking disappointed.

Tony claps a hand around his shoulder. “Sorry, man. You can beat Clint up when he gets back, though.”

Thor inclines his head. “That is a small comfort.”

-

Calling Coulson ends up being unnecessary; Bruce gets there first, and a couple of hours later he's going away on a 'retreat', which sounds, to Tony, like some kind of creepy cult thing.

“All I'm saying is that if he comes back and he's all 'I love cool-aid', then I'm out of there.”

Steve groans and drops his head into his hands. “Are you trying to make me feel bad?”

“Nope, that part's just an added bonus.” He sighs as Steve groans into his hands some more. He'd got Steve to come back to his house for the afternoon with little protest: Clint and Natasha made this whole big deal about what happened, going as far as to say that maybe Bruce shouldn't be on the team at all – and okay, maybe Tony encouraged them _a little_. Steve looked so ridiculously sad and guilty that Tony was a half-step away from bundling him up and carrying him out to the car. If he could pick Steve up. Which he can't; he's already tried.

“But what if he is thrown off the team?” Steve asks.

“Well, it doesn't really seem like he likes being with us, maybe he'd be better off.” Tony shrugs. Sometimes Bruce looks _physically pained_ when talking to him. “And look, that's not your problem. You've gotta take better care of yourself.”

“Like you do,” Steve says flatly.

“We aren't talking about me.”

Steve rolls his eyes. “Clearly.” He leans his head back against the couch, exposing his throat, which of course means that Tony has to lean in and lick it. He shivers and bumps Tony with his shoulder. “I thought we were going to watch a movie.”

“Not till Pepper finishes her conference call,” he murmurs into Steve's neck. Her calls always come at the most inopportune times, namely whenever he wants attention. So, all the time. He pulls his knees up onto the couch and twists around until he's pinning Steve in place; smiles as Steve's hands splay across his back. He ducks his head and kisses him softly, mindful of Steve's bruises and cut lip. Steve is less careful, slanting his mouth over Tony's, pulling Tony down against him, one hand snaking into his hair.

But no, Tony's being reeled in by one of his own patent moves. He pushes himself back, settling with his thighs straddling Steve's legs. “You're hurt,” he says, punctuating it with a nod. “And we still aren't done talking about this.”

Steve stays slumped against the couch cushions, relaxed despite his ridiculous guilt complex. _I did that_ , Tony thinks, and has to bite his lips to keep from smiling. No, he's being serious right now; Anthony Stark: Responsible Adult. “Don't try to beguile me with your... mouth.”

Steve tilts his head to one side. “You started it,” he says lazily.

“Yeah well, when Pepper isn't around, you have to be the responsible one. Didn't you get the message?”

“You said I wasn't allowed another phone after I broke the last one,” Steve reminds him. It pained Tony to give him something as mundane as a pager (ugh, who even uses those things any more?), but it pained him _more_ to see beautiful phone after beautiful phone get dropped, stepped on, drowned, or cracked in Steve's crazy strong grip.

“Be that as it may,” Tony says, with the air of a man who is not sitting in the lap of Steve Rogers, “there's still the expectation that you be the sensible one. You know that I can't be trusted with anything.”

“Tony, you're making even less sense than usual.”

Tony bounces a little – Steve squeezes his eyes closed for second, and isn't that interesting; Tony's definitely going to press that particular issue later – and nods. “Exactly! So, really, it's cruel of you to force me into coherency for such a length of time.”

“That... is some logic,” Steve says.

“What's some logic?” Pepper asks, crossing the room towards them. She isn't holding her phone; Tony never thought he'd feel so relieved at a lack of technology.

“Tony's 'logic',” Steve replies.

“Oh, we have other terms for that at work.” She sits down next to Steve; Tony rolls off him and worms his way in between them, one leg thrown out across hers.

“Steve won't take Bruce beating him up seriously!” he tells her immediately.

“I see.” She looks at his leg for a moment, but doesn't unleash her killer nails on it. “You can dole it out but can't take it, Tony?”

Steve laughs loudly; Tony's death glare does nothing to abate it.

“However,” she continues, and 'howevers' are always bad news. She leans forward, fixing her gaze on Steve. “What Bruce did was serious, and you need to take better care of yourself.” The 'or else' is implied.

Steve stops laughing, suitably humbled. “I'm sorry,” he says, and of course he sounds totally sincere. “What movie are we watching?”

“ _Die Hard_ ,” Tony says. He's been steadily working Steve through the decades, film-wise, and he thinks he's finally ready for the one true Bruce. “You're gonna love John McClane.”

-

The house is his father's, allegedly the 'family home', though Tony spent less than half his childhood there. When his parents died, he inherited the place, but at Obadiah's suggestion he left it to be managed by him, and took off to California.

When he went back there a year ago after Fury made it clear that he needed a base in New York, he found the place to be completely empty; no furniture, no pictures, none of his father's equipment that had dominated an entire basement floor of the house. Pepper looked furious. Tony brushed it off as less for him to deal with.

He wakes up to an empty bed. It's just after six in the morning, and for a moment he wonders if Pepper has left, but there are noises coming from downstairs and he never used to be this clingy. He shakes himself and rolls out of bed.

Downstairs, the foyer is filled with boxes – packing boxes. Pepper's at the front door, wearing leggings and one of his old MIT sweatshirts – he takes a moment to appreciate the view – handing back a form back to a guy on the step.

“Thank you, Kevin,” she says.

“No problem, Ms Potts,” he replies and nods brightly at Tony. “Morning, Mr Stark.”

“Do I know that guy?” Tony asks as she closes the door.

“He's one of our couriers. You paid off his mortgage a few years ago.”

Right, his abortive first attempt at philanthropy. “What's all this stuff?” Each box has something written on it, like 'SSR 1942-45', 'SHIELD 1967', 'STARK EXPO 1950-60', all in familiar block capitals.

“It's some of your father's things.” A smile lights up her face. “Just a fraction of it, but it's a start.”

“How the hell did you find it?” Everything Obi had pretty much vanished after he died. What was left of the Stane family completely closed ranks, and Tony was glad of it, he preferred to pretend that they didn't exist.

“Jim... sourced them.”

“Do I want to know?”

She shakes her head. “As an employee of a government organisation, no. Come and have a look at these ones.”

She leads him around the maze of boxes to one particular stack. His attention is caught by a box that says, 'FLYING CARS'; Pepper tuts at him and steers him away from it.

“But flying cars...” he says as his eyes fall on the boxes she's indicating to. “...oh.”

Four boxes in two stacks, the same blocky handwriting identifying them as 'TONY 0-5', 'TONY 5-10', 'TONY 10-15', 'TONY 15-20'.

“Damn,” he murmurs. “Have you looked in them?”

“No, do you want me to?” Her voice is almost unbearably gentle, like being confronted with his father's ghost is going to make him freak out and take off or something.

“Whatever,” he says, forcing a smirk. “I think I can deal with a little tape.”

“Good,” she says, and gives him a push forward, “then get to it.”

“Slave driver,” he mutters. He rips the old dried up tape off of the '0-5' box and lifts the flaps, peering inside.

Pepper gives him a couple of moments before asking, “What's in there?”

“Uh, baby clothes.”

“Baby clothes?” she echoes, coming to stand by his side. “I didn't know you were ever a baby.”

“Me either,” he says.

The clothes are placed in clear plastic bags alongside well read children's books, creatively shaped plastic toys, and folders marked as 'drawings'. He opens one of them and finds dozens of drawings of car parts, fairly amateurish but drawn with a steady hand. He vaguely remembers sitting in the workshop while his father worked, trying to emulate the incredible designs Howard had pinned to the wall; typical that his dad would keep these. The second folder, though, contains different kinds of drawings, lop-sided houses, stickmen, unidentifiable species of animals, all signed 'Tony, aged 3' in crayon.

“Huh,” he says. “I didn't think... he kept any of this crap.”

“It looks like he kept everything,” Pepper comments, delicately picking through more of the contents.

They spend most of the morning going through the boxes. His father's designs are fascinating, some so advanced that in thirty plus years the world still hasn't caught up to him; Tony not sure that even he could build some of this stuff. He really wants to try though: the idea of it settles in his gut like a weight, making him just the right kind of nervous.

Pepper is mostly interested in the folders full of loose photographs that chart Tony's progression from cherubic toddler to surly teenager. They sit on the floor side by side, Tony completely destroying his father's ordered categories, Pepper being careful to keep everything in its original folder.

“You were so...” she begins, looking at a fifteen year old Tony, the summer before he started at MIT.

“Cute? Adorable? Charming?” he suggests.

“So dorky,” she finishes. “Braces _and_ an Adam Ant t-shirt? The eighties were not kind to you.”

“They were the eighties, they were kind to no one,” he says, tugging the picture from her fingers. It is pretty bad, though. “I bet you had a perm up to here,” he says, waving his hand a couple of inches above her head.

She laughs. “I had the Madonna poodle hair; I was obsessed with her when I was twelve.”

“Nice,” he says, and goes back to reading about nuclear fusion. Out of the corner of his eye, he catches sight of school photos, baby photos, one particularly hideous patterned shirt that Pepper has the good sense not to comment on.

“Oh,” she says a little while later. “Now, this is my favourite.” She hands him a photograph attached to a collection of papers with a paper clip. It's of him and Rhodey at their graduation. Rhodey's wearing a gown, a cap clutched between his hands, the look of a man who has been retching over the toilet all morning on his face. He has wobbly geometric shapes shaved into one side of his high top; that's what happens when you let a drunk seventeen year old at your hair with electric nose hair clippers, he tells Pepper. He's pretty sure his rationale behind it had been that if Rhodey looked like an idiot, the Air Force wouldn't let him enlist.

The dean refused to let Tony attend the commencement ceremony as a student, so instead of a cap and gown, he's wearing baggy shorts and a ratty Sex Pistols t-shirt, unsurprisingly one of his favourites, half his hair shaved off in a drunken attempt at a mohawk. He'd done that the night before, too – a lot of interesting hairstyles came out of that graduation party.

He slides the picture from the paper clip and flips it over. On the back it says, in his father's pedantically neat handwriting, 'Tony and Rhodey, MIT graduation, June 5th, 1987'. He hadn't thought that his father ever paid enough to attention to the things he said to pick up the names of his friends.

“I'm emailing this to Jim,” she says.

“Please don't, he'll just give me more shit for it. He didn't talk to me for a week after this.” Which accounts for why Rhodey is looking off camera, while Tony unsuccessfully tries to hang off him.

“Perhaps that why I'm going to do it,” she says evenly. She taps the papers. “What are these?”

“They're, uh.” He turns them the other way up. “Jesus, I think this is my bachelor's degree. Yeah, Anthony Edward Stark, Summa Cum Laude.” He's pretty sure that his parents bribed the dean to get him that, considering how many times he was on academic probation and how many of his electives he failed. “I didn't even know that we had a copy of this. I never bothered to pick it up.”

He can feel her eyes on him as he studies the certificate. “God, if he'd just said something...”

Pepper rubs his shoulder for a minute, then drags over another box. “Tell me about this collection of mint condition _Star Wars_ action figures,” she says.

By the afternoon, they've repacked and moved most of the boxes out of the foyer, or, rather, Pepper has directed Tony to move them; they seemed just fine where there were, to him. He's just getting to the last of them when one in particular catches his eye. It's smaller than the rest, more like a hat box than a packing one, with hurried, shaky writing along one side.

 _Steve_ , it says.

“Pepper!” he calls. “Pepper, come here!”

Without her heels on, she can easily sneak up on him. She's at the door already, bluetooth headset in, looking mildly annoyed. “What?”

She follows to where he's pointing, and her eyes widen. She takes her headset out and pockets it. “Are you going to open it?”

“I dunno.” He looks at it warily, and she rolls her eyes.

“It isn't going to detonate, Tony.”

“You don't know,” he replies.

She rolls her eyes some more and crosses the room to pick it up and set it down on a table. She removes the lid and puts it down firmly.

“What's in it?” he asks, peering over.

“Sketchbook, medical files, enlistment documents.” She hands him a few when he edges closer. He thinks briefly that he shouldn't look in Steve's old sketchbook, judging by how territorial he gets over his new one, but then he's flicking through it, noting its progression from multiple angles of James Barnes, to multiple angles of Peggy Carter, then some circus monkeys, then back to Barnes and Carter, then nothing for the last twenty pages or so.

“Tony,” Pepper says.

He glances up. “These are really good, you know,” he says, before trailing off. She's holding up a round film reel container. In printed letters on the front it says, 'Confidential, Property of the SSR'.

“I wonder what this is,” she says.

“Something dear old dad was not meant to have, looks like,” he replies.

-

It just so happens that Tony bought a projector a few months ago to give Steve an authentic forties movie night. It turned out that he much prefers Tony's vast high definition flat screen, though he hates 3D. It made him motion sick, which was just about the funniest thing ever.

Tony sets the projector up in the main lounge, moving a painting out of the way that gets Pepper snapping at him not to scuff it, because does he know how much that is worth? He does not, and she promises to half the monthly salary he receives from the company, to 'teach him the value of a dollar'. It's hardly the first time he's been threatened with this, though it normally came from Obi; his face must fall a little, because then Pepper's hugging him. He lets her for a little while before shrugging her off with a dismissive sound and a roll of his eyes.

He loads the reel and switches the projector on, sitting down on the floor near it as Pepper settles herself on the couch. For a couple of seconds, it rattles through empty lengths of film, and he thinks that maybe it's gone bad, all those years hidden away in a box. Then the picture lightens, throwing a muddle of blurred shapes onto the wall before they solidify into a picture. It looks like a lab, or maybe a scary doctor's office – he can make out lots of crazy looking equipment, all sharp lines and imposing shadows. There's a man in glasses standing by a hospital bed; his mouth is moving, but the audio is poorly synced and it takes a moment to kick in.

“ _Please, sit down_ ,” the audio plays, and the picture shows the guest already crossing into the camera's path, bony shoulders hunched. Tony can tell it's Steve before he turns his face to the camera; he stills hunches his shoulders like that sometimes, when he's nervous and thinks no one's looking at him.

“ _You're filming this?_ ” Steve asks. It's jarring how he sounds exactly the same, like under everything he's still the waif and stray on the film.

“ _Procedure, my boy. No one will see it for a very long time, I promise you that._ ” The doctor says the date for the film, then asks Steve, “ _Would you mind removing your shirt?_ ”

Even in grainy black and white Tony can make out the shape of a bruise stretching around his side when Steve unbuttons his shirt. The doctor looks pained.

“ _And what is this?_ ”

“ _Basic training got a little out of control, sir,_ ” Steve replies.

The doctor shakes his head. “ _It is unfettered aggression that got us into this._ ” He sighs and presses a stethoscope to Steve's chest. “ _You have heart palpitations, yes?_ ”

“ _That's what the army docs say._ ”

“ _Have you ever fainted?_ ”

Steve takes a second to respond. “ _Once or twice._ ”

The doctor smiles, and moves the stethoscope around. “ _Breathe in as deeply as you can and hold it, please._ ”

Steve doesn't last more than a few seconds before he's doubled over in a coughing fit that shakes his entire body. The doctor gives him a shot that brings it under control, but leaves him twitchy and cuts the tests short. The footage charts several similar days that all end in Steve being incapacitated in some way. The doctor – Dr Erskine, Tony picks up after a while – rattles off several illnesses, heart conditions, asthma, childhood ailments of all kinds; all of which went apparently untreated.

“Uh,” Tony says quietly, the sound of the projector filling the room. He looks around at Pepper. “Maybe we shouldn't be watching this.” It feels like something so intensely private that even Tony is mildly embarrassed. The thought that he would ever be this exposed to someone turns his stomach.

“Are you going to turn it off?” she says.

“I guess...” he says, turning back to the screen. He starts a little at Steve seemingly having grown three times larger.

“ _Feelin' like a pin cushion yet?_ ” someone asks off camera.

Steve shrugs as a doctor – not Erskine – removes a needle from his arm. “ _It's fine,_ ” he mutters. He rubs his hands over his face and leaves them there for a couple of seconds. When he removes them, his face is so completely uncomposed that it seems that he might be about to cry.

“ _Do you... do you think that the colonel will let me go to Erskine's funeral?_ ” he asks quietly, so quiet that the audio only just picked it up.

“ _Oh, buddy, I'm sorry,_ ” the other person says, moving in front of the camera. He has a thin moustache along his top lip. Tony rocks back. “ _Erskine's Jewish, he's already been buried,_ ” Tony's _dad_ says.

“ _Oh,_ ” Steve says, and falls silent. He lets the doctor continue prodding him, and Howard stands by for a few minutes before crossing his arms over his chest.

“ _You done with him yet, doc?_ ” he asks. The doctor's reply is completely unintelligible. “ _You're done,_ ” Howard decides. He throws a thumb over his shoulder. “ _Get._ ”

The doctor shakes his head, but leaves anyway, and Howard takes a couple of steps closer to Steve. “ _You've gotta get it together,_ ” he says. He looks into the camera. “ _Let's start with turning this damned thing off._ ”

Howard blocks the camera entirely as he advances on it, and then a second later the picture fades away, leaving the image of his father in Tony's mind. He stares at the wall, though there's nothing left to watch, then shakes himself and reaches up to turn the projector off.

“Heavy,” he says.

“Steve shouldn't see this,” Pepper says.

“Shouldn't we at least tell him we found it?”

She purses her lips. “Would you like to watch footage of yourself during and after Afghanistan?”

He cringes. “Point. You know, this has been a really emotional few hours, maybe we should have sex. To relieve the tension.”

“That's your answer to everything,” she replies.

He gets up and pulls her to her feet. “Sex is the only answer I need.”

-

They give Steve everything apart from the film. He sits on the couch with the box balanced on his knees, a million different emotions playing out on his face in quick succession when he looks through it. He holds his sketchbook carefully, as if it might disintegrate.

“I didn't think I'd ever see this again,” he says, rubbing his fingers along the cracked spine.

Tony shrugs. “With my dad, nothing was ever forgotten. Ignored, but not forgotten. Man had the memory of an elephant.”

Steve makes the face that he always makes when Tony insults his father, like he wants to argue but he doesn't want to hurt Tony's feelings (even though Tony has thoroughly reassured him that he _has_ no feelings), so he just presses his lips together and squints a little, looking slightly constipated. “Well, I'm glad. Where was it all this time?”

Tony glances at Pepper, who picks that moment to look up from typing on her StarkPhone, something to do with the company, as always. She's barely ever parted from that thing now. She smiles quickly and looks back down.

“We don't... really know. All this stuff-” He waves a hand at the various stacks around the lounge, some of them already overflowing with the treasures that Tony has picked through, discarding the boring stuff and hoarding the cool designs and gadgets. “-was, I don't know, off the grid for a while. Stolen,” he decides.

Steve's eyebrows shoot up. “People stole this stuff? I'm not that good of an artist.”

“Don't sell yourself short,” Tony quips, but even to him it sounds weak, and Steve's expression says that he won't be able to brush this off without answering. Pepper finishes tapping at her StarkPhone and comes to sit on the arm of the couch, next to Tony. “It was-- This guy, Stane. He was a grade A dick.”

“He stole _all_ your stuff because he's a dick?” Steve asks.

Tony's never told him the whole sordid story, and even though other people – namely any agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. – could clue Steve in, Tony doubts he'd pry like that. Steve knows that the arc reactor was a consequence of an 'incident', and he knows that this 'incident' happened in Afghanistan, and he's probably connected some of those dots to form a basic picture, but he's never asked. He's never asked why Tony decided, seemingly apropos of nothing, to up and become a superhero; being a hero is the most normal impulse in the world to Steve, so why would he?

“Was,” Tony corrects. “Was a dick. He's dead.” He takes a steadying breath and thinks, _may as well throw all my chips into this game_. “I killed him. Only person that I've... killed.”

“Oh.” Steve's eyes are wide – he looks at Tony, then at the sketchbook in his hands, then sets it and the box on the floor. Tony knows that Steve's killed people, more people than Tony, for sure, but that was war, not malice on Steve's part. Tony's filled with malice; it's gnawing at the edges of his mind just thinking about Obadiah.

“He was _Howard's_ best friend, his protégé.” He snaps out his father's name aggressively enough that Steve breaks eye contact, his body shifting with tension. “I loved him and I hated him and I-- I killed him. My father didn't give me the time of day, Steve, and Stane knew that and I think-- sometimes I think he killed them, my parents, just to-- to--” he continues, wondering why he doesn't just shut the fuck up. Steve doesn't need to know the depths of his crazy.

“Obadiah Stane,” Pepper interrupts, and she's leaning into him, a hand on his back, “was a extremely manipulative man.” Her voice is absolutely ice cold; it freezes the swirling emotions in Tony's chest. “He fooled everyone: Howard, Tony, me, Jim. He wanted control of the company. He killed people. He tried to kill Tony. He got _nothing_.”

She gives Tony a long, hard look. “Tony didn't do any of this alone, Steve,” she says, but she's still looking at Tony. He swallows, and leans his head against her side. They've never talked about it, except for one time that he got shit-faced and ended up crying in the bathroom. Good times.

Steve looks downright distressed. “I didn't-- Tony, why didn't you...?” He fidgets with his hands, seemingly unable to still them.

“There are just some things that we don't talk about.” Steve knew so much about him from day one, before day one, from the TV and from S.H.I.E.L.D. reports; he was a womanising, borderline alcoholic billionaire who never worked an honest day in his life, and he wanted that to be it. Steve had seemed so delicate at the time, he wanted to not be a complete wreck for once. He'd never had to be the strong one in any of his relationships, but he wanted to be, for Steve. “We prefer to let them fester until we have massive, probably televised, breakdowns.”

Pepper sighs, but it sounds good-humoured enough. “That is sadly true.”

Tony reaches across and takes hold of Steve's twitching hands. “It's okay, it was a long time ago, I'm over it.” Thankfully, neither of them call him on this blatant lie, though Steve looks even more sad and wide-eyed.

“Your father was a good man, once,” he says, very quietly

“Well, yeah, he had you as a friend.” Tony smiles and tugs him closer. Steve goes willingly, scooting down the couch until they're pressed together.

Steve tangles their fingers together, his mouth a straight line. “Can I--?” he says, then pauses. “What did Stane... do?”

Tony winces. Pepper moves her hand from his back to his arm, leaning forward to wrap her arms around him, chin resting on his shoulder. Steve glances at her, and then looks even more worried.

“Don't make scary faces at Steve,” Tony says lightly.

“I'm not,” she says. He knows she is, even if she doesn't: she always gets that slightly murderous expression when Obadiah's mentioned, the one that can clear a room in ten seconds flat. Add that to Steve's natural phobia of women, and that's his Kryptonite, right there.

“I-- I shouldn't have asked,” Steve stammers, “I'm sorry.”

“Pep's just being protective.” Tony presses their hands against the arc reactor, warming their entwined fingers. “He took it from me.”

“From you?” Steve repeats slowly, frowning.

Tony doesn't want to say the words. Arc reactor. Ripped out. Shrapnel worming its way towards his heart. He lets go of one of Steve's hands and flattens it over his chest. “Out of me.”

“Oh,” Steve says in the tiniest voice possible, rubbing his fingers lightly over the edges of it.

“Yeah,” Tony murmurs. “But I think I got a pretty good deal out of it, huh?”

-

That night Steve stays over without argument, and Tony sleeps with Steve's arms wrapped around his waist and the top of Pepper's head tucked under his chin. He wakes up long before either of them do, long before it's even light out, but he knows that if he moves even a little, Steve's going to wake up too, like the guard dog of a man that he is.

So he stays still, caught between the warmth of them, content to lie there until he eventually goes back to sleep. And eventually is going to be a very long time, because he's already thinking about the boxes downstairs and his father's designs, and he itches to get up and shake off the nervous energy that's building inside him, like it always does at this time in the morning, when he can feel the steady hum of the arc reactor the most.

Steve shifts, one hand skimming higher on Tony's side to come to a rest on his rib cage, and he presses his face into Tony's back, snuffling a little with the change in position. Pepper uncurls one of her hands trapped between their bodies, nails scraping across his t-shirt.

Tony is definitely okay with this.

When he wakes up again, he's flat on his stomach, and it's starting to get light out, evidenced by the brilliant white glow coming off the snow on the roof of the house across the street – and why the fuck are the curtains open? He squeezes his eyes shut.

“You didn't put sleeping pills in his drink last night, did you?” Steve asks quietly.

“Do you really think I'd do something like that?” Pepper voice drifts in from an adjoining room.

“Yes...?” Steve says. Tony smiles and opens his eyes again; he can see Steve's reflection in one of the mirrors, shirtless with wet hair and a towel in hand. Damn, Tony always misses shower time.

Pepper laughs. “Maybe. But I didn't this time.” Tony closes his eyes quickly as she comes out of the walk-in closet, passing his side of the bed. He's kind of curious about how the two of them interact when he isn't involved; he hasn't quite shaken the feeling that this relationship revolves around him, and for some reason it's not a pleasant thought.

He opens his eyes as Pepper holds up two pairs of shoes, hanging loosely from her fingers, to show to Steve. “Which ones?” she asks.

“Those ones,” Steve says, pointing to the black pair with killer heels. Such a traditionalist.

“I'm taller than you in these,” Pepper muses, dropping them to the floor to step into. “Tony would say that a man's choice in women's shoes says a lot about that man.”

He would, too.

Steve scrubs at his hair with the towel. “So,” he says, and clears his throat, “do you think they're going to go for it?”

Pepper smiles, and reaches over to take over drying his hair. “You say that as if they have a choice. Everyone knows I'm the hard ass around here.” She slips the towel around his neck, and uses it to haul him in, kissing him quick, then slower, twisting her fingers in the towel. “Don't let Tony... do anything,” she says, then steps back, smoothing down her shirt primly. Steve looks a little flushed.

“Even super soldiers have their limits,” he says, trailing after her out of the room.

Tony waits for a couple of minutes, until he can hear those heels on the staircase, then rolls over and sits up. “Jarvis, what were they talking about?”

“Good morning, sir, it is 8.32am, and it is a chilly ten degrees fahrenheit outside. Ten inches of snow fell while you were sleeping.”

Tony glares at the speaker mounted in the corner of the room. “Jarvis, answer the question.”

“What question is that, sir?”

“What were Pepper and Steve talking about?” he says slowly.

“Shoes, I believe.”

“Before that.”

“Drugging you so you would sleep, sir.”

Tony takes a deep breath. “ _After_ that.”

“Ah,” Jarvis says, and pauses. “I'm afraid I can't say, sir.”

“Can't?”

“What comes to pass within these walls is entirely confidential, even to you, sir. It is my solemn vow as butler to keep the secrets of the household.”

Tony stares at the speaker. “What the fuck have you been reading while I've been away?”

“A great many things; recently, _Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management_.”

“Uh huh.” Tony blames himself, really, for programming Jarvis to be such a smartass. He thought it'd be funny to listen to him argue with Pepper; he didn't think his own fucking AI would prefer her over him. Maybe that slipped into the programming somewhere, too. He scoots to the edge of the bed and gets up.

“The shower is running,” Jarvis informs him. “I suggest you give it a few minutes before getting in.”

“Oh, thank you ever so much,” Tony says, bowing to the room.

“Your English accent is _quite_ dreadful, sir.”

-

Tony isn't known for his subtly; the first time he had sex, he hacked into the school's intranet, _WarGames_ style (that movie really has a lot to answer for), and remotely took over the computer of the girl in question with the program: 'Do you want to have sex with me, Y/N?'. Variations on this theme served him well for years.

Steve, however, practically repels anything other than the sincere, God's honest truth, which makes all of Tony's inept attempts at leading questions useless.

“Where's Pepper?”

“She went out,” he says, proudly dropping a plate of eggs in front of Tony; from the looks of the kitchen, he fought a valiant battle for them.

“Yeah, thanks, Captain Obvious. Where did she go?”

“Work,” he says, turning around the wash the dishes. Tony still hasn't been able to convince him to use the dishwasher. It's a nice view, though.

“She's supposed to be on holiday. Is something special going on?” He's starting to get that itchy feeling, like people are conspiring against him. Irrational as fuck, because Steve is the least conspiratorial person in the world, and Pepper only ever does things for Tony's own good, _he knows that_ , but he still feels that familiar wild desire to cut and run.

Steve shrugs, the way his shoulder blades move under his t-shirt momentarily distracting Tony from his swirling thoughts of crazy. “I don't know.”

“Well, you talk to her, don't you?” Damn, but these eggs are good. “I mean, you spend time with her when I'm not around.”

“You're always around.” Steve's smiling as he turns back round, wiping his wet hands on his pants. Side-stepping the question, Tony notes. “How's the motorcycle going?”

“It's still in Malibu, I'm gonna have it shipped over soon, it's almost finished.”

Steve lights up (Tony's pretty sure that he has a thing about motorcycles; that and shoes), and says, “Didn't you get a new car recently? Can we take it out for a drive?”

Tony lifts a shoulder. “I guess.”

“Can I drive it?”

“No.”

Steve pouts, an honest-to-God _pout_ ; he's making it extremely difficult for Tony to stay irritated at him. “Why not?”

“Because you crashed my car, broke _my_ phone and several of yours, and somehow managed to knock the flat screen off the wall. You are the reason we can't have nice things.”

Steve sticks his chin out. “You made me drive that car two months after I got out of the ice! I didn't know cars could go that fast, and anyway, you got me all confused. And Thor broke the television; he said I did it because you said you'd take away his videogame privileges if he broke anything else.”

“Be that as it may, you are not driving the Starkmobile.”

Steve's mouth twitches at the name – he loves Batman, bought the issue of _Detective Comics_ that Bats first appeared in back when it was new, though it's long gone now. Tony can't quite make him understand what a tragedy this is. “Fine,” he says, crossing his arms over his chest.

“Fine,” Tony replies, then stuffs the rest of his breakfast in his mouth in one go, just to see Steve's nose wrinkle up in disgust.

-

He drives them around Manhattan for a while, but man, Manhattan is _boring_ , it's all clothes shops and Starbucks. He does get face time with some of his adoring fans while Steve hides behind the first magazine he finds in the glovebox: _Playboy_. He squeaks, but doesn't immediately cast it into the well of the car; he's come such a long way in such a short amount of time.

“Okay, this is boring,” Tony decides, taking a sharp left and cutting through Chinatown. Steve doesn't work out where they're going until they're driving over the Brooklyn Bridge, then he grins and cranes his neck to look at the passing skyline.

“You'd think you'd never seen Brooklyn before,” Tony says, reaching over to ruffle Steve's hair, just because he can.

“Everything's so different now,” he says vaguely, ducking away from Tony's hand.

“You've been back here, right? Since...” Tony asks, sliding his eyes over to Steve. Steve shakes his head and leans forward to watch as they pass under the last arch of the bridge. “What? What the hell did Fury do with you all that time?”

“He was worried about my state of mind. Suicide watch, you know.” He sits back and stretches his legs. “No shoelaces.”

“Jesus, Steve,” Tony says, taking his eyes off the road to stare at him.

Steve shifts uncomfortably, looking ahead. “I wasn't going to, I was just... really overwhelmed.” He flicks his eyes over Tony for a second, then back at the road. “And then I met you, you and Pepper, and... things got better.”

“Right,” Tony says, and steps on the gas. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Steve blushing, carefully looking out of the window. Tony should say something, he shouldn't just leave Steve hanging after admitting that Fury once thought he was depressed enough to actually fucking _kill himself_. That Tony had, like, saved him or something, when really, Tony can literally barely keep himself alive from day to day.

“I got beaten up in that alleyway,” Steve says suddenly, pointing to said alleyway. “And... and...” He trails off, frowning. “Never mind.”

Tony slows the car down. “No, go on, you know how I love hearing about all the times you were beaten up.”

Steve laughs, light and easy, even though Tony's not sure that his tone wasn't a little too sharp for it to really be a joke. “How long have you got?”

“So,” Tony says, tapping his fingers against the wheel. How... _vulnerable_ Steve might have once been is not something he likes to dwell on. “I guess you lived around here, then? Wanna take a walk around the neighbourhood?”

“Someone might see us,” Steve says, then stammers a bit as Tony feels his face do weird things. “I mean that, um, that you're pretty recognisable and... Fury's still pretty angry about what happened in LA, and he doesn't want any more pictures of me... facial recognition and--”

Tony's never known someone to ramble quite so ineloquently as Steve is prone to do when he's nervous. “Steve. Steve, I think we're _slightly_ more conspicuous in this car than we are out on the street. Look, I'll pull my scarf up over my mouth, people only recognise me because of the goatee.”

“I-- okay.” Steve flushes again and fumbles with his seatbelt. “I didn't mean that I don't want to be--”

“Calm down, okay? Jesus.” Tony rolls his eyes like it doesn't matter, like he doesn't know that Steve only gets agitated in this way when Tony gives him cause to. Like he's always waiting for Tony to have a meltdown. “Come on, boy wonder,” he says, and parks the car, then gets out.

“Hey, I'm not--” Steve ducks out of the car, his boots crunching in the snow. “I'm not _Robin_.”

Tony presses a button on his keychain, and protective covers slide up over the windows, the hub caps slide forward and extend outwards to cover the tyres. Steve whistles in appreciation, then repeats, “I am not Robin.”

“Well, who d'you want to be? Because I'm clearly Batman, we can agree on that much, can't we?”

“You're Christian Bale's Batman.” He jumps up onto the sidewalk next to Tony, pulling his gloves out of his pocket as he goes. “Not Adam West. Maybe Michael Keaton, but he was kinda neurotic.”

“Oh my God, you're such a nerd,” Tony says, reaching out and wrapping his arm around Steve's neck. Steve twists awkwardly with the height difference, but doesn't pull away. “You can be Batgirl, you're cute and blond, and your costume is goofy enough.”

“I can't believe you made me watch that movie all the way through, it was _awful_.”

“The first franchise killer is always the hardest,” Tony sympathises.

Nobody's given him a second glance yet, everyone on the street is more interested in a) the car, and b) Steve. He moves his arm from its near stranglehold on Steve's neck to his shoulders, pushing him along. They walk a few blocks, arguing about all the terrible movies that Tony's forced Steve to sit through as part of his 'modern education', until Steve slows down, and then stops.

“What?”

“This used to be a--” Steve points up at the building they're standing in front of. “This used to be an orphanage.”

“Looks like it's a fancy apartment block, now,” Tony says. Steve doesn't respond, his eyes sweeping over the building as if cataloguing every brick, like he does on missions. _Oh._ “This used to be _the_ orphanage?”

“Yeah...” Steve runs his gloved fingers over the railing for a moment, loose strands of wool sticking to the ice, then shakes his head. “Let's, uh, I'll show you where I got drunk for the first time, come on.” He tucks his arm into Tony's and pulls him along.

Steve got drunk for the first time on alcohol made in someone's bathtub, in the cellar of some guy he'd never met before.

“Have you never heard the words 'stranger danger'?” Tony asks, then adds, “A bathtub?”

Steve shrugs, walking a little ahead like he hasn't care in the world. “It was Bucky's idea, he 'knew a guy'. It was more like paint thinner, really. I got really sick.”

Tony stops, and Steve turns around, shaking out snow that's settled in his hair. “I have... so many questions. Why was it in a bathtub?”

Steve grins. “Prohibition. Bucky maybe could have got into one of the shadier speakeasys, but I definitely couldn't.”

“Prohibition ended in 1933,” Tony says. He took his history of alcohol consumption very seriously. “You were fifteen in '33.”

“Right,” Steve says, and smiles even wider.

“So when did this cellar bathtub paint thinner thing happen?”

Steve bites his lip. “Well, I'd only known Bucky for a few months – I think he was trying to impress me – so it would have been... 1930.”

“You were twelve? Damn, Rogers, I've underestimated you.” He smacks Steve on the arm, then gives his bicep a squeeze for good measure.

“Everybody does. You guys didn't invent poor decision-making, you know.” He tugs Tony closer and pulls down the scarf gathered around Tony's chin with his index finger. Tony raises an eyebrow, and Steve darts in for an extremely dry, _extremely_ cold kiss before he rearranges the scarf. It's probably the boldest non-Nazi hunting thing that he's ever done. “Come on, I used to live on the next block with Bucky, I wonder if the building's still there.”

Steve's tour of Brooklyn is uniquely _Steve_ , with asides about exorbitant $10 a month rent, and rats that ate the bread that Bucky swiped from the bakery before they could. Steve's never stolen a thing in his life, but he did occasionally reap the benefits of his friend's life of crime. The building directly across from their room in the boarding house (“Sometimes we had to... share a bed, in the winter,” Steve mumbles, “but nothing ever happened.”) is where the local doctor lived, above the butcher's. He treated Steve's asthma for free, in return for anatomy illustrations to use in his offices. Tony's looked up old treatments for asthma online: amphetamines, which would have made Steve's heart palpitations even worse; he refrains from making any cracks about drug abuse.

Steve tells him that he used to work on the corner of 7th Avenue and Union Street. 'Selling newspapers!' he cries when Tony leers.

(“So you were like those kids in that musical?”

“What?”

“The one with Batman.”

“What?”)

Steve's in the middle of telling Tony about when he met Bucky for the first time: being chased into an alley by local kids, only to be saved by the first of Bucky's many acts of heroism, when his pager beeps shrilly. He prods at it for an unduly long amount of time – Tony has to force himself to not to snatch the thing from him and do it himself – then says they should be getting back.

“Why? Has something happened?”

Steve shakes his head. “No, I just, I can't think of any more embarrassing stories to tell you right now, is all.” He smiles that thousand watt smile that gets people all over fainting. Tony narrows his eyes.

“Who was that?” he asks, pointing to pager still held in Steve's hand. Steve shoves it into his pocket.

“Nothing important, just uh, Fury. Come on, Tony, I can't feel my face any more. Can we just go back to the car?”

Steve is a really awful liar. “If that was Fury, you'd be out of here like your ass was on fire,” Tony observes. He keeps a few inches of space between them.

Steve's mouth twists. “C'mon,” he repeats, then quietly, “Trust me.”

Tony stares for a couple of moments, then shrugs. “Fine.”

The ride back is awkward and quiet; Steve keeps looking at him, then looking away, and Tony doesn't know how to say 'I'm sorry I'm being really weird right now' without having to explain _why_ , and he knows from experience that without a Pepper-filter, expressing his feelings doesn't tend to go too well.

Jarvis welcomes them home with the same lilting sarcasm in his voice as the morning, and directs them to the kitchen. “Ms. Potts is waiting.”

Steve gives her a big goofy smile when he sees her, and drags Tony to a seat.

“Tony, I have something to tell you,” Pepper says. She leans across the kitchen island, gaze flicking to Steve for a second.

He shrugs out of Steve's grip. “I don't want to sit,” he says, and she gives him a bored look.

“Have you been like this with Steve all day?” she says. “You know he takes your moods to heart.”

Steve says 'it's fine' as Tony mumbles, “Not all day.” He takes a deep breath and continues, “Look, I just-- I don't mind you keeping things from me, I know you don't tell me everything, but--”

“Tony, shut up,” she says, and he closes his mouth. She's always had a way of cutting through his crap and his, admittedly pathetic, defences, even when she was a (he likes to imagine, at least) twenty four year old with a crush. And he does trust her, above anyone else and certainly more than himself, he knows that – that she always has his best interests at heart. It's just that they're... different now, both of them, and he's more pathetically desperate than ever to not lose her.

She takes his hands and squeezes them. “Stark Industries headquarters is moving out to New York.” He stares, and she continues, “So, I'm going to be working out of our New York office soon. Once we sort out the details.” She rubs her thumbs in circles on the backs of his hands.

“Oh,” he says. “So, you're going to be... here? Like live here, with me?”

She rolls her eyes. “ _Yes_. We are engaged, you know. Honestly, what did you think was going on?”

“I, uh.” He looks round at Steve, who's still grinning like an idiot. “That's what all those phonecalls and...?”

She nods patiently, unable to completely keep a smile off her face as he works through the information.

“You said it would cause too much upheaval,” he half accuses, frowning.

She nods slowly, and Steve shifts a little closer; he looks vaguely guilty when Tony eyeballs him.

“Don't men say that it's a woman's prerogative to change her mind?” Pepper asks.

He looks away from Steve. The heavy feeling in his chest is rapidly lightening. “Only sexist and dismally unenlightened men, Potts.”

“Oh, I'm sorry, I forgot that you're a 'new man'.”

“Hey, I'm part machine, I'm as new as they get.”

She tilts her head and smiles. “Tony, you're the most human person I know.”

He nods at Steve. “Except for Steve.”

“Except for Steve,” she agrees.

“So, this is...” Tony sits down, twisting around to face them, hooking his feet on the bottom of the stool. Pepper's still got those killer heels on, so they both tower over him. “This is good,” he says. He can't keep the grin off his face, truth be told. “But I don't know about you two conspiring; seems like I should have a problem with that.”

Pepper shakes her head. “You love it.”

Maybe he does.

-

News like this deserves a party, and it's been so long since he's had one, at least three months; there was a time that a party at Casa di Stark was expected at least once a week. When Tony calls his go-to alcohol supplier, the guy almost sobs with relief – apparently the alcoholism of Tony and his friends had been keeping his business afloat. Tony promises to put in a standing order, just to help the guy out. Pepper isn't very complimentary about his idea of donating the excess to the needy.

He spent weeks planning his last party, fretting over what kind of drinks Pepper would like, and should there be food, music, and when should he propose to Pepper, and should he invite Steve – he couldn't not but wasn't the whole 'hey, look at me wanting to marry this woman' thing going to get Steve even more confused? and on and on and on.

This time he just sends a mass text that says: 'party at mine on friday. alcohol, illicit sex (bring your friends) etc. ask coulson if you don't know my address.' and gets a text in return from Coulson that reminds them all that 'under NO CIRCUMSTANCES should you bring any of your non-S.H.I.E.L.D.-approved friends'.

“This is... a lot of booze,” Steve says, eyeing the crates being hauled in early on Friday morning. He's still in his pyjamas – sweatpants, Stark Industries t-shirt and bare feet – and looks adorably sleep-rumbled. Kevin the courier gives Tony a _look_ as he rounds up his flock of little couriers and ushers them out.

“Between Thor and Fury, we're going to need it.” He puts his hands on his hips and surveys his kingdom – it's not a bad haul, by no means his biggest but still the respectable beginnings of a Stark extravaganza.

“It's scary how much Fury can drink,” Steve says. “I don't think I've ever seen him get drunk. I wonder about him, sometimes...”

“Don't wonder. Wondering stuff like that is gonna get you 'deactivated'.” He turns in a circle. “We need tiny umbrellas.”

People start arriving in the early evening, mostly S.H.I.E.L.D. agents he's never seen before, but they pad the numbers, so he's cool with it; and when secret agents cut loose, they cut _seriously_ loose.

Thor appears at eight with a barrel of... something under his arm. “Mead!” he says, when questioned on it. “Your alcohol is passable for formal events, but celebrations such as these require a stronger sort.”

Jane and Darcy peek out from behind him as he looks for somewhere to put it; Tony yells at him not to put it on the coffee table, 'it's an antique!', and Steve zips in to redirect him.

“Tony!” Jane exclaims, and then suddenly she's hugging him. He's only met her once in person, and they've only ever talked shop on Skype, but she's tiny and clever and hot, and it's certainly not unwelcome.

“Start the party a little early, Dr Foster?” he asks, patting her on the head. She coughs and disengages.

“Jane does not like flying,” Darcy says. “Quinjet liquor cabinets are very well-stocked.”

“You came all the way to New York just for me? I'm touched.”

Jane flushes. “Oh, S.H.I.E.L.D. moved the Tessaract to their facility on Staten Island. It was either come here, or have some S.H.I.E.L.D. flunky destroy our research.” She says it with such disdain; she is clearly a woman after his own heart. “Which, by the way, yes. I- Your work on the Tessaract was just _incredible_ , I mean... we're, like, at least – at least! - ten years ahead in our understanding of it thanks to you.” She stops and frowns. “Sorry for throwing myself at you.”

He pats her on the head again. “No apologies necessary, I am always available for hugs.”

“Can I get in on that action?” Darcy asks. Jane reprimands her, but Tony just opens his arms. Darcy is... well, best not dwell on that right now. Her hand drifts dangerously low on his back before she pulls away. “I wonder if I can get a hug from everyone at this party.”

“Start with Steve,” Tony says. “He is terrified of your breasts.”

She sticks her chest out and adjusts her bra. “As well he should be.”

-

Rhodey arrives looking like he's had seven shades of shit beaten out of him, and Tony proceeds to tell him this as he walks through the door.

“Thanks,” Rhodey mutters.

“No, seriously.” Tony closes the door and turns to follow him into the house. Rhodey's got cuts on his hands, bags under his eyes, and a cast on his arm. “What happened? And when? And _why_ didn't you tell me?”

“Remember that small Eastern European country? Turns out despotic dictators don't appreciate you liberating them.” He hooks a thumb through one of his belt loops, casting that surreptitious solider-look around the room, the same as Steve does, assessing the situation. “There'd better be a lot of alcohol at this party, because your last one did not deliver on that front.”

Tony crosses his arms over his chest, attempting to channel his inner Captain America. “That sounds like an Avenger-y thing, why didn't I know about this?”

“You're a consultant, they don't tell you everything.”

“Well, they didn't tell Steve either, because he _does_ tell me everything.”

Rhodey shrugs. “I guess they needed something a little more subtle than six brightly coloured superheroes.”

Tony narrows his eyes, and Rhodey shrugs again. “Want a drink?” Tony asks, because what the hell, his people skills do not cover this sort of thing.

“Yeah, a beer, none of that fancy shit you like.”

He waves Rhodey towards the kitchen. “One no-fancy-shit beer coming up.”

There's a crowd gathered in the middle of the lounge, all watching as Thor gives a demonstration of how to incapacitate the enemy with Clint as his subject. Tony's pretty sure Maria's got a pool going.

“You break it, you buy it!” Tony yells as he passes. “And I'm including Clint in that!”

In the kitchen, Pepper's sorting through the fridge, and Steve's leaning against the counter, talking nervously with Darcy. She is all up in his personal space, which Tony happens to know that Steve values quite highly (though he's quick to forget that with people he _really_ likes), her little hands spread out over his biceps. Abruptly she pulls herself up and wraps her arms around his neck; what little Tony can see of his face through her dark hair is almost as red as her lipstick. He pats her on the back awkwardly and then tries to gently disentangle her from his neck; she still manages to land a kiss on his cheek.

“Are we interrupting something?” Tony asks. Darcy steps back gracefully, while Steve's expression clearly says, 'help me'.

“Oh,” Darcy says. She adjusts her skirt and looks from Tony to Pepper, then back over her shoulder at Steve. “I didn't mean to step on anyone's toes.” She shakes her hair out and breezes past Tony. “Clint!” she shouts as she gets out of the room.

“Hate parties,” Steve mutters, “especially _yours_ , Tony.”

“This? This is a fucking kids' party.”

“I didn't like those either,” he says darkly.

Pepper bites her lip and closes the fridge door, a can in her hand. “You're so tragic sometimes. Just stay close to me or Tony and you'll be fine.”

“You've said _that_ before.”

She rolls her eyes and Tony reflects on how nice it is that she doesn't just do that to him any more. It's been several days since he's done something eyeroll-worthy, even. Tony grabs a can of beer from the counter; it was, indeed, too shitty to take up space in the fridge, so Rhodey should love it. “Here you go,” he says, tossing it to him, “this is total shit.”

“Are you okay, Colonel?” Steve asks, eyeing Rhodey's injuries.

Rhodey doesn't even get a chance to draw the breath to speak before Tony cuts in, “Oh, it's _confidential_ , apparently. Not allowed to talk about it.”

“It's nothing as sinister as that,” Rhodey says, pressing the tab of the can back. “S.H.I.E.L.D. wasn't taking point on the mission, so there was no need to get you guys involved, not when the Air Force had Iron Man's cooler brother-” He raises his voice over Tony's indignant objection. “-and Tony's just being a conspiracy theorist nut. Did you know that he used to drag me to supposed UFOs sightings when he was a teenager?”

“And there is an alien currently destroying my lounge,” Tony interjects. “So, point to me.”

“Yes, but you were, like, full-on _X-Files_ about it,” Rhodey says, and takes a sip of his beer. “You were sincerely worried about being abducted for most of 1987. Because obviously you, with your unfathomably intellect, would be a sought after commodity.”

Steve laughs. Tony glares at him. “I'm sorry,” Steve says, not sounding _at all_ sorry, “but that does sound like you.”

“Oh, go away,” he mutters. Steve grins some more and Rhodey peers at Tony, then Pepper, over the rim of his can. He looks... thoughtful. Tony doesn't like when Rhodey gets thoughtful, it almost always leads to Deep Talks.

From the lounge, there's a thump, a yelp, and then Thor's barrelling through the door, hair a tangled mess. “Steven!” he cries.

Steve looks alarmed. “Yeah?”

“I require your assistance in the lounge. I need a more worthy opponent. Clint has proven too soft.” He sweeps his arm vaguely, cuffing a passing S.H.I.E.L.D. agent around the head.

“Thor, this is a party,” Steve says.

“Exactly! And no one else has heart enough for a good fight. Anthony, you should pick your guests more carefully.”

“Noted,” Tony says.

“Thor,” Pepper says, immediately capturing his attention. If Tony wasn't so secure he might even be... jealous. “We don't tend to fight at parties on Midgard. Or at least, something has gone horribly wrong if a fight does break out.”

“But Lady Pepper, how else will I prove myself the worthiest of fair Jane's hand than by besting potential suitors?”

“That's a good point,” she says, as Steve splutters something to effect of _I've never even-- I'm not a potential-- That is not a good point!_

Thor bows his head in thanks, and turns back to Steve. “I will make certain that Darcy leaves you be for the rest of the night.”

Steve screws his face up for a moment. “ _One_ match.”

Tony waits for a minute after Steve somewhat unwillingly trails after Thor before speaking. “So,” he says to Rhodey, “I hear that you had something to do with finding all these boxes of crap that are cluttering up my house.”

Rhodey and Pepper share a quick look, quick enough to miss but for the fact that Tony's known both of them for over a decade and he actually is kind of observant, despite evidence to the contrary.

“I can see that I'm going to regret going out of my way to help you, _yet again_ ,” Rhodey says. “In fact, I think I already have with that photo Pepper emailed me.”

“You actually sent that?” Tony asks, affronted. Pepper's sly smile hits him in all the right places; he's pretty sure that she could lead him into the pits of Hell with that smile.

“I said I was going to,” she says. “I keep my promises.”

“I think you're being a bit disingenuous there, Potts.”

“I think that's a big word for you,” she replies.

He reaches out and plucks the can out of her hand. “I'm even not drunk yet, failure of vocabulary is still to come tonight.”

“Did you look in the box that had Steve's name on it?” Rhodey asks.

“We did.” Tony narrows his eyes. “Did _you_?”

“No! Well... I peeked. But only a little. I mean, his service record was in there...” He trails off, looking vaguely crazed; Tony remembers when he introduced Rhodey to Bill Gates at one of his dad's boring-as-fuck galas. Rhodey is a _just_ as capable of being a complete fanboy as Tony is.

There's another crash from outside the kitchen, loud enough that they all jump in surprise, followed by Steve's worried voice asking, “Oh God, are you okay?”, and after a beat, Thor replying, “I am well, you just... caught me off guard. Don't think this means you have won Jane's heart quite yet.”

Tony can only imagine how red Steve's face is right now. “I think maybe we should have a 'Thor and Steve destroy everything' budget,” he says.

Pepper rescues her beer can, and shakes her head. “I think it's covered under the 'Steve accidentally breaks things' budget.”

“We have one of those?”

“Who did you think was paying for those broken phones?”

-

It turns out the Thor really isn't joking about the mead: Tony has a cup, and rapidly loses the ability to focus on objects more than a few inches from his face. Thor and Erik drink most of it, and it must be some kind of weird Nordic rivalry, because Erik is so utterly out of league, but he keeps plugging away at it.

“Bet this could you drunk, even,” Tony says to Steve, as Steve half carries him to a couch.

“Pretty sure we need a designated adult here,” Steve replies, and puts him down as gently as he can beside Pepper. She smiles and winds an arm around Tony's shoulders. “And apparently I'm it when Pepper isn't, right?”

“Yes, you are, Steve,” Pepper says slowly, speaking very carefully. She must be really drunk. “Oh, is that Bruce? He's late.” She indicates vaguely to the other side of the room, where Bruce is standing awkwardly, with a (and Tony can't make out her features, but he's still pretty certain) knock-out brunette by his side. Way too good for Bruce, for sure.

“Did I invite him...?” Tony asks no one in particular, squinting at the Bruce-shaped outline.

“You sent that message to everyone in your contacts list,” Steve says. He raises a hand at Bruce and waves him over. “Be nice,” he hisses at Tony.

“I'm always nice, I'm extremely...” He was right, Bruce's friend looks like supermodel. “Nice.”

“Hey, Bruce,” Steve says, and jumps up. “I'm glad you made it. And I guess this is Dr Ross?” He holds his hand out. “Pleasure to meet you, ma'am.”

Tony didn't realise Betty Ross was a supermodel. “It's nice to meet you too, Captain,” she says.

Steve smiles beautifully and Betty laughs softly. “I thought you were kidding, Bruce.”

“Kidding about what?” Steve asks.

Bruce shrugs. “I said you were... nice.”

“Oh, okay. Just as long as you're not spreading distressing rumours about me, like _some_ people do,” he says, turning to glare at Tony.

Tony grins, and waves at Betty. “I'm Tony. I'm also really pleased to meet you, but I'm not getting up. This is Pepper.” Pepper nods and smiles.

Betty blinks. “Bruce has told me about you, as well,” she says.

“It's all lies,” Tony says. “Or the God's honest truth, depending on if you find it charming or not.”

“Are you...” Jane pops up from seemingly nowhere; Tony fuzzily recalls that Clint spent a while out in New Mexico, maybe she learnt tiny ninja skills off him. “I'm sorry, you're Dr. Elizabeth Ross, aren't you?” She stares bright-eyed at Betty. Clearly Jane is on the happy end of the drunk person spectrum.

“Betty,” Betty says.

“Your work is just-- I'm Jane, by the way. Your work is amazing. I'm not a-- I'm an astrophysicist, but I read up on cellular biology sometimes, and you are my favourite.”

“I thought I was your favourite!” Tony exclaims, flailing his leg to kick her, and grossly misjudging how far away she is.

“You must be Dr. Foster,” Betty says, unfazed. You've got to be pretty unfazable to be the Hulk's girlfriend, he guesses. “You're the one who reopened the wormhole to Asgard..”

“Well I--” Jane fiddles with her hair. “Not alone, but... yeah. Do you want a-- my friend makes amazing cocktails.”

Betty turns to Bruce, and they have a silent conversation, the kind that Tony is well versed in with Pepper. Bruce nods very slightly. “I'd love to,” she says at last, and follows Jane into the next room.

Bruce stands awkwardly in front of them, as does Steve, who's clearly forgotten where to put his hands. They start speaking at the same time, platitudes overlapping each other. Steve digs his hands in his pockets. “You go,” he says.

Bruce purses his lips. “I just wanted... to apologise. What happened was just completely unacceptable, and I've been working really hard to make sure it wouldn't happen again.”

“No, it's fine, really. Look, we should have believed you when you expressed your concerns. I'm sorry that I didn't listen to you. It was at least partly my fault.” Tony snorts at this, and Steve swings his foot back to catch Tony in the leg.

Bruce is shaking his head. “It's on me; you didn't force me, I could have refused.”

They go on like this for another couple of minutes, apparently trying to out-nice each other, and Tony is content to sit there and listen to it in the warm glow of not-my-fault, until Bruce mumbles, “I'm a liability to you guys.”

Pepper cuts a look at Tony. He sighs. “Shit, Bruce, we're all liabilities.” Steve and Bruce stop politely arguing and look down at him. He leans forward and rests his elbows on his knees. “I had a breakdown two months ago because I was sad about being away from Pepper, Steve still doesn't know the meaning of 'self-preservation', Clint's an ex-con, Natasha's probably ex-KGB, and Thor has a worryingly close relationship with a supervillain. We are not a group of well-adjusted people.”

Steve's smile is like (and Tony's drunk so he can be as cliché as he likes right now) the sun coming out. Tony feels himself begin to blush; having Captain America be proud of you is pretty much the best feeling in the world.

“There're fancy teas in the kitchen if you want something to drink,” he mumbles, leaning back against Pepper.

Steve pats Bruce on the back gently. “I'll come with you.” He spares another soft-eyed look for Tony before hustling Bruce across the room.

“That was very nice of you,” Pepper tells him, wrapping her arm tighter around him. She sounds considerably less drunk now. He isn't though: he can't really feel his legs. He shifts around until his head rests against her chest.

“Wasn't I saying? I'm a nice guy.”

-

Inviting exclusively agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. classes up a party pretty damn fast. There's a considerable decrease in the levels of theft, destruction of property, and general defilement (although, he does catch Clint and Natasha sneaking upstairs at around two am; he tells them that if they have sex in his bed, he'll have sex on everything they love, starting with Mandy, no matter how painful the experience might be for him), so much so that Pepper's 'Tony Stark party budget' has been almost halved.

This is why, at close to three in the morning, he's at the bar with a beautiful woman, engaging in a lively and loud... debate about physics. They've filled several sheets of paper, and occasionally the top of the bar, with equations written in the ink of the many pens that Jane produces from various parts of her body.

“This is--” She taps one of the sheets detailing plans to harness the energy of the Tessaract that are truly brilliant in their insanity; it's something that's been in the back of his mind since Coulson so rudely confiscated his research, but Jane's the one who makes it work. “I mean, I am... quite drunk right now, but I think this is it.” She rests her cheek on her arm draped over the bar and looks at the equations lovingly. “God, I want to have sex with your brain.”

He blinks slowly, lifting a hand to rub at the corner of his eye. “Funny coincidence, my brain wants to have sex with your body.”

She barely responds, just one corner of mouth turning up as she stares on, unfocused. Has he really become that non-threatening? He's pretty sure that he used to set hearts aflutter with this kind of shit.

“Betty's really pretty,” Jane continues, gaze shifting to somewhere past his shoulder. He turns around and sees Betty sitting on Bruce's lap, both of them looking happy and relaxed, listening to one of Thor's wild tales of heroism and godly shenanigans. Tony thinks that maybe that's not something that happens often for them, being able to just enjoy being together. Tony's met her dad.

He looks back Jane. “Dr Foster, is there something that Thor should know?”

“Oh, _oh_ , Thor knows,” she says, looking at him through her eyelashes.

He grins. “I knew there was a reason that I liked you.”

“Don't hit on Jane.” Arms clamp around his shoulders, hugging him from behind. “She is pure and virginal, unlike us.”

“Darcy.” He pats her hand. “How's your mission going?”

“I just have Coulson and Bruce to go,” she says. “Betty keeps cockblocking me, and Coulson's disappeared.”

“You got a hug from Fury?”

She lets go of his shoulders and comes around to perch herself on his lap. “He's like a big teddy bear, I don't know why all you guys are so scared of him.”

She wobbles a bit and he steadies her with a hand to her waist. “You do know that my fiancée is _just_ over there, right?”

“And about to make out with Cap, looks like,” she says. And it does kind of look like that: they're sitting on a couch, Steve with an elbow braced against the back of it, head resting in his hand, gazing at Pepper with his patented 'you are the only person who exists in the universe' gaze, while she has her legs drawn up onto the couch, one stretched out, hooked around one of his. Huh, seems Steve's getting mighty used to PDA.

Darcy shifts impatiently. “Anyway, you're old enough to be my dad. Not that I wouldn't, but, you know.”

He gives her a shake. “Excuse you, I'm only forty-one.”

“And I am twenty-two, so. Anyway, look at all the numbers I got.” She shoves her phone (the newest model StarkPhone because he gives them to everyone he likes – even Coulson has one; Clint does not) in his face, and it takes a couple of seconds for his eyes to uncross.

“That's a lot of numbers.” He takes hold of her wrist and pushes it slightly away. “You got Rhodey's number?”

Her smile is downright devilish. “Mm, you have good taste in friends.”

“I think it's more like, my friends have bad taste in me,” he says.

“Aw,” she crows, and plants a kiss unsteadily on his temple. “You are so angsty, it's adorable.”

“I am not _adorable_ , Steve is adorable. I am a virile, devastatingly handsome billionaire.”

She shrugs. “You're both adorable.”

Jane nods into her arm.

“Okay, ladies.” He takes Darcy firmly by the waist and lifts her off him, gets up, and puts her down in his seat. “This was nice, but I have to go have extremely disturbing and not-adorable sex with my fiancée now. Good day to you.”

He walks over to Pepper and Steve as suavely as he can, even if his legs do still feel a little bit like jelly, and Darcy and Jane are laughing loudly about something behind him. He drops down beside Pepper and rests his chin on her shoulder. “Hello,” he says, and she vaguely pats his hair, continuing her conversation with Steve.

They're talking about some extremely boring thing, like the economy or Steve's shield or the progression of women's rights; which are cool, by the way, Tony is one hundred percent for all those things, but only in so far as they don't affect his ability to get people's attention. “Pepper,” he says, then repeats her name at a steady volume as they blithely ignore him.

Steve breaks first under the steady of pressure of Tony's nagging, as Tony knew he would: Pepper has many different filters, and the one used the most is her 'Tony is invisible' filter.

“You seem to have... something on you,” Steve says, barely suppressing a smile.

“I thought I heard something.” She turns her head and looks at Tony. “Hello.”

“Pepper!” he says. “Whatever you're talking about here sounds extremely dull, and Darcy and Jane don't think I'm virile.” He pauses and points at Steve. “Also, I have something for you.”

Steve frowns. “I don't-- How are those three things connected?”

“They aren't, keep up. But, it's downstairs. The thing.”

“What?”

Pepper laughs softly. “The thing is downstairs,” she says, “Keep up.”

Tony tries to smoothly pick her up, but at the best of times she's all long legs, long arms, and long torso, not exactly conducive to being carried, and certainly not when straight lines are failing him, so he settles on sticking to her back like glue, glaring at Darcy as he passes by her on the way to the stairs.

“Shut your eyes,” he tells Steve, once they make it down to the basement.

“What's going on?” Steve says, eyes dutifully closed. Tony situates him in the workshop, smiling at Pepper. Kevin didn't just bring copious amounts of alcohol with him this morning, he also personally oversaw the journey of Steve's motorcycle from Malibu to New York; Tony wishes that everyone who he gave huge sums of money to proved so loyal. He takes hold of the edge of the dust sheet covering it and pulls it off with a flourish. Pepper squeaks a little; she knew he'd had it shipped over, but this is the first time she's actually seen it, and yeah, the reaction is more than a little gratifying. Steve turns his head to her, brow creasing, although he doesn't open his eyes.

“Okay, open,” Tony says, and throws his arms wide.

Steve's expression is blank for a couple of long seconds, before his eyes widen, and he steps forward, reaching out almost tentatively.

“You can touch it,” Tony says. “In fact, you can rub any part of yourself against it repeatedly; it's yours.”

“This is...” He closes his fingers around one of the handlebars. “Tony,” he says, his voice breaking a little, and Tony is seconds away from telling him that this is a happy thing – be happy, why are you sad?, don't be sad – but then Steve grins and runs his hand along its side. He touches it like he's trying to memorise it with his fingertips – he does that with Tony and Pepper, too (and the guy has the softest fucking hands, must be the serum). Tony's not sure if that's slightly disturbing or ridiculously hot. Maybe both.

Steve drops down onto his knees and rakes his eyes over the machine, giving it a thorough inspection. Tony elbows Pepper, grinning, and she elbows him back, a little harder than is sportsman-like, but she looks proud, and maybe having Pepper Potts be proud of you is _even better_ than Captain America. He's not sure, he'd have to run several peer reviewed experiments.

“I wish I had my motorcycle license already,” Steve says.

“Oh, Steve, did you think I'd leave you hard up?” He slips his wallet from his back pocket and sorts through the many cards held within before finding the one he wants and handing it over.

Steve looks at it with a suspicious frown. “A fake driver's license? _Tony_.”

“Nah, of course not. I hacked the DMV; as far as they're concerned, 'Steven Roberts' took his driving test three weeks ago, and got 79% on his written exam. You'd have done better if you'd study more.” Steve does not appreciate the joke, it seems, frowning even deeper. Tony continues, “You know how to drive one of these things, right?”

“Of course I do.” He scrutinise the card some more. “Where did you get this head shot of me?”

Tony waves him off. “And I know you studied all the road safety manuals that have been published within the last decade, I've seen them in your room.”

Steve looks at him, unconvinced.

“ _And_ , it works the exact same way as the bike you had before. I even resisted the – extremely tempting, thank you very much – urge to install jet propulsion on the back.” _Next time, my darling_ , he thinks, _next time_.

Steve turns the laminated card between his fingers a couple of times, then stands up and draws Tony into a hug that's just the right side of crushing. “Thank you,” he says quietly.

“Yeah,” Tony agrees, burying his face in Steve's neck.

“You aren't going to use that license, are you?” Pepper asks.

Steve pulls away from Tony slightly, twisting to look at her. “Probably not. But it's the thought that counts, right?”

“Almost always with Tony,” Pepper says.

-

When he wakes the next morning (...well, afternoon), caught in a tangle of Steve and Pepper's limbs, he's surprised that his hangover isn't worse. The alcohol of the deities should really lay a forty-something guy with a bad ticker out, but this isn't any worse than a good old-fashioned vodka hangover; which is to say that the toilet is still going to be the best friend he's ever had. He does remember Steve insisting that he drink several bottles of water throughout the night, so maybe that has something to do with it.

He drags himself, along with several blankets, over Steve and off the side of bed, landing none too gracefully on the floor.

“Tony?” Steve mumbles, turning over.

“I'm just gonna, uh, either vomit or check on our guests. Maybe vomit on the guests, I haven't decided yet.” He waves a hand, grasping at the bedside table for support as he gets up. “Keep Pepper warm,” he says, and piles the blankets back on top the two of them. Steve rolls over again and burrows into them.

Tony manages to find equilibrium enough to get downstairs and survey the destruction wrought upon his house. It's not too bad: empty bottles everywhere, various articles of clothing, and some... thing ground into the carpet in the lounge, but there's no structural damage, so really, it's a win.

Thor is asleep in the lounge, making the couch he's lying on look like one of those fancy pet beds, Jane curled up on top of him. At least they're mostly dressed, Tony thinks as he shuffles into the kitchen; God only knows where Clint and Natasha are.

Rhodey's in the kitchen, seemingly fighting with Tony's new coffee maker; after a minute or so of watching him quietly from the doorway, Tony takes pity on him.

“Jesus, it isn't rocket science,” he says, pushing Rhodey away. He bends over the machine and whispers, “It's okay, did he hurt you, baby?” It whirs unhappily for a second, then, after some more coaxing from Tony, grudgingly pours the coffee.

“You gave it a personality?”

“Steve talks to the appliances sometimes, figured they should be capable of appreciating the attention.” He passes the mug to Rhodey, who practically puts his entire face in it. “How was the party, did it live up to your sleazy expectations?”

Rhodey shrugs, lowering the mug enough that Tony catches a smudge of red on his cheek. “Well, you know, no one did any body shots, or snorted cocaine from between someone's breasts, but that stuff Thor brought was pretty killer.”

Tony licks his thumb and leans forward. “Looks like someone got off with the jailbait, though,” he says, rubbing the lipstick away.

Rhodey scowls at him. “She's twenty-two.”

Tony cocks his head. “Damn, Rhodey, that was a joke.”

“Oh, shut the fuck up,” Rhodey mutters. “You're so goddamn smug when things are going good for you.”

“I guess,” Tony says, and looks back at the coffee maker. He strokes it a couple of times and it gives up his coffee; such a cheap date, it must get that off him. He drains at least half the cup with his back turned to Rhodey, angling himself so that he can't catch Rhodey in the corner of his eye.

“I am too hungover for this,” Rhodey mutters, then drops his hand to Tony's shoulder, giving him a gentle shake. “Look, you aren't gonna screw this up.”

Tony grins, looking around at him. “I would not recommend putting money on that.”

Rhodey sighs. “You realise this whole thing you and Pepper have got going with Steve is crazy, right?”

Tony tilts his head to the side and lifts a shoulder. They haven't actually talked about 'this whole thing' beyond one extremely awkward suit-to-suit conversation mid-battle, when Rhodey came to the realisation that 'you're sleeping with _Cap_?' after Tony checked on Steve before tending to the innocent bystanders. Steve and Fury both reamed him out for that; he's still working on getting his 'priorities' straight.

Rhodey knew him well enough to know that he wasn't doing it behind Pepper's back (because, Christ, he talked Tony down so many times after The Kiss; Tony pretty sure Rhodey would kill him if he screwed up _that_ stupidly), and had refused to listen to anything further to do with his sex life.

“But I get the impression from Steve that he doesn't do anything lightly,” Rhodey continues. “And I know Pepper doesn't. Also, Cap is pretty crazy.”

Tony nods. “I-- I know that. Believe me, me and Pepper had many long, harrowing conversations about this.” She'd spent hours with him, picking over his feelings for Steve, grilling him on what exactly his intentions were, because, and he's quoting her here, 'Steve doesn't strike me as the casual fuck kind of guy' “And Steve is... he's great. Pepper's great, everything great. I'm not so great, is the thing.”

“Tony,” Rhodey starts, but Tony shakes his head.

“You don't need to, you know, stroke my ego, I do that regularly myself. It's okay, it's fine. I'm okay, I'm always okay, so let's... not talk about it?”

“If you're sure,” Rhodey says, and takes a sip of his coffee. He doesn't look very convinced. “But... if you do ever need to talk, you know that I'm always here, right?”

_“Yeah, _okay_ , whatever,” Tony replies, rolling his eyes skywards. “Don't make it weird.”_

Rhodey huffs. “If you ever tell me anything about how you're debasing my _childhood hero_ , though, I _will_ hurt you.”

-

Tony tasks Jarvis with corralling and ejecting all the leftover revellers, scattered as they are all over the house.

“Please tip your hostess on the way out!” he calls as people start to get into cars.

“I hope I'm not the hostess in this scenario,” Pepper says, her voice gravelly, a blanket wrapped around her. Steve hands her a glass of water and a bottle of Tylenol before he goes back to picking glass out of the carpet. Jarvis is becoming somewhat exasperated with Steve muscling in on his territory.

“Clearly Steve is the hostess,” Tony says.

“We shall bid you leave!” Thor says, having collected Erik from somewhere upstairs and slung him over his shoulder. Jane's at his side, looking a little green. Pepper hands her the bottle of painkillers, and Jane dry swallows more than is probably safe for someone of her stature.

“Enjoy yourself?” Tony asks.

“It was a diverting night,” Thor says. “There was a distressing lack of battles, and the alcohol was subpar, but there was a pleasing amount of revelry and copulation, nevertheless. _Especially_ copulation,” he stresses, looking at Steve. Steve concentrates on the floor's detritus.

“I didn't do anything... _really_ embarrassing, did I?” Jane asks.

“Well, you said that you wanted to have sex with me. And Betty. Pepper, Steve, Bruce, and, uh, Loki,” Tony replies. Jane buries her face in her hands. “So, no.”

“Come!” Thor says. He places the arm not currently occupied with keep a grip on Erik around Jane with the kind of gentleness that he almost never displays. “When you're well, I will pleasure you. Thoroughly.”

“Thor!”

Tony turns to Pepper as they leave, and raises his eyebrows.

“No,” she says.

He turns to Steve.

“No,” Steve says.

-

Christmas day ends with Clint having several pints of someone else's blood transfused into his body, Tony with a concussion and eight stitches in his cheek (he's disappointed when the doctor says it'll heal clean: it would have made one killer scar), and Natasha on the rampage.

“You doing okay?” Steve asks, having finally escaped the doctor who looked upon the rapidly healing bruise on his jaw with undue amounts of interest. Tony sways slightly on the cot someone pushed him onto when they got to the S.H.I.E.L.D. hospital.

“Tired,” he says, and looks at his fingers; they seem impossibly far away from his body. “I just wanna go to sleep.”

“I know,” Steve says, and suddenly he's standing right in front of Tony, hands resting lightly on his shoulders to stop him from pitching forward. “But the doc says that you have to stay awake for another forty minutes, at least.”

Tony buries his face in Steve's stomach. “I hate everything,” he complains.

“I know,” Steve repeats. It sounds like he's laughing. Tony pokes him in the hip. “Ow,” he mutters.

Tony sighs happily and relaxes against him, until Steve pushes him back, gently shaking him. He is no fun, why is he never any fun? “No, come on, you have to stay awake.”

“ _Fine_ ,” Tony grumbles, crossing his arms over his chest. He looks around the room slowly, waiting for his vision to stop blurring: Natasha is limping back and forth angrily by the double doors that lead to the ICU that holds Clint, scaring away the nurses that approach to treat her injured leg, Bruce is getting another shot of whatever downers they give him post mission, and Fury is... huh.

“Am I hallucinating or is Pepper quiet-yelling at Fury?” he asks Steve.

“You're not hallucinating,” Steve says.

So Pepper really _is_ standing in the doorway with Rhodey behind her, laying down the law to a Colonel Fury who looks completely caught off guard. Tony catches the words 'unprepared' and 'irresponsible', but mostly she keeps her voice low enough that you wouldn't even know she was there if you weren't looking, while still being able to eviscerate anyone within five feet of her. Rhodey looks rightly worried.

“Pepper!” Tony calls, and grins when she glances round at him. She purses her lips, looks back at Fury and says one last thing – and Tony must be hallucinating, because he thinks he sees actual regret on one-eye's face – then walks away from him, Rhodey at her heels, a hand carefully placed on her shoulder.

Steve moves around and settles on the cot next to him, the dipping of the thin mattress enough to almost send Tony tumbling into his lap.

“How is he?” she asks Steve. Tony pouts; what is it with people and talking over his head?

“He's got a concussion. The doctor doesn't think there's any brain damage, but they want to keep him a little while longer to be sure.”

“There's no brain in there to damage,” Rhodey says. Tony laughs hard and long at that.

“Which brings up a good point,” Pepper says when he's settled down again. “You took off your _helmet_ in the middle of a fire fight.”

“Audio went down, couldn't hear anything,” he says, ducking his head.

“And you didn't just retract your faceplate because...?”

“I dunno,” he mutters, and turns his face into Steve's shoulder. He can feel Steve sighing.

“Stop trying to go to sleep,” he says.

“'m not. Got a headache, it's too light in here.” He isn't lying, there's a pounding behind his eyes that persists even with all the nice drugs they gave him for his other injuries. Steve is immensely fall-asleep-on-able, though.

“Here,” Rhodey says, and pokes something into his chest. “Wear these.”

With a huff, Tony sits back up and looks at what Rhodey is holding: a pair of aviators. “Ugh,” he says, “your sunglasses are cheap and gross. No, no, wait--” He reaches out and grabs them as Rhodey starts to pull away. “I'll wear them. Why've you got sunglasses on you in December?”

“ _Top Gun_ is a lifestyle, Tony.”

“It was my fault,” Steve says suddenly, beginning to blush when their attention swings to him. “I got hit and Tony thought that, you know, that something bad had happened because he couldn't hear me.” His face is ridiculously contrite.

“He got hit in the face with his own shield,” Tony says solemnly.

“Someone stole your shield?” Pepper asks.

Steve looks at his feet. “Yeah.”

“Oh, Steve,” she says, patting him on the shoulder, “that's _terrible_ , I'm sorry. Are you okay?”

Steve smiles. “I'm fine.”

“I am also fine,” Tony says. Pepper narrows her eyes and kisses him on the forehead.

“So what exactly happened?” she asks, pulling away a little but still staying close enough that Tony can feel how cold she is; her face looks pink and raw from the snow, and she's got one of his thick parkas wrapped around her.

“It was HYDRA,” Steve says, looking suddenly very serious. “They attacked one of the research facilities, looking for the cube. We flew out there, but well, there were a lot more of them than we thought there'd be.”

“Yes,” she says sharply, turning to glare in Fury's direction. Fury stares resolutely at the junior agent he's talking to. “It seems that you weren't very well-prepared.”

“I guess...” Steve says, clearly unwilling to lay blame on the great god Fury.

“They shorted out our communication system with some kind of pulse thingy,” Tony continues, “then one of them got Steve's shield from him and smacked him in the face with it.”

“And then he took his helmet off,” Steve says, tapping Tony on the arm.

“Hey, I thought he'd cracked your head open!” he protests. “That shield of yours is fucking lethal!” As he found out. He touches his stitches gingerly: the HYDRA guy had been aiming to take his head off, but only winged him and sliced his cheek open. Tony remembers yelling ' _mother_ fucker!' and delivering him a laser burst square in the chest. “And then the giant robot hit me over the head.”

“The giant robot?” Pepper repeats.

“There was a giant robot,” he explains. “It hit me over the head with its giant robot arm. Everything after that is a little hazy.” He remembers telling Jarvis to take the wheel, and the weird sensation of the suit controlling his movements instead of the other way round, and that's about it.

“What about...?” Pepper nods to where Natasha is, still pacing. Coulson's there too, now, moving fluidly with her, a hand on her arm.

“Oh, one of them banged Clint up a bit – Natasha went totally scorched earth on their asses.”

Steve frowns. “They broke his leg and shot him in the shoulder. If Coulson hadn't pulled him out of there, he'd probably be dead now.”

Tony shrugs. “Just a flesh wound, nothing keeps that little fucker down.” He thought he'd imagined the S.H.I.E.L.D. SUV tearing down the middle of the street, picking off HYDRA soldiers as it went. He looks at Coulson again: he's got blood on his cuffs and the bottom of his shirt, his hand is clenched to a fists at his side, his eyes are trained on the doors. It's the least in control that Tony's ever seen him...

“Oh, gross,” Tony mutters.

Steve glances around, confused. “What's wrong?”

“Nothin',” he says, and almost manages to suppress a shudder. Steve wraps his arm around Tony's back, rubbing his hand up and done Tony's side; Tony decides to let him continue thinking that he's cold.

“Tony, you are not dead!” Thor announces, at a self-consciously reasonable volume, as he strides into the room. “I was concerned that your Midgardian frame would be unable to withstand such an impact.”

Tony squeezes his eyes shut and opens them again. “Thanks? Where've you been?”

“As the lone uninjured member of our group, I had to... debrief with Sitwell.” He wrinkles his nose in disgust.

“How did that go?” Steve asks.

“Poorly.” Thor glances over his shoulder and narrows his eyes. “Come along!” he calls, then again, more forcefully. For a long few moments, the doorway remains empty, before his reluctant companion trails on...

“Isn't that Loki?” Rhodey asks.

Tony squints. “Yeah...” He hadn't made that up either? Man, this day has been crazier than anything his wayward imagination could cook up. “I think he... helped us?”

Thor slaps a hand on the back of Loki's neck, dragging him closer to them. “Loki, this is Lady Pepper, overseer of Tony Stark and controller of a vast and powerful syndicate, and this is Lieutenant Colonel James Rhodes, a fearsome leader in the Midgardian military.”

“Man, I sound cool,” Rhodey mutters.

“And this-” Thor sweeps one large hand in the direction of Tony and Steve. “-is Tony Stark, the man of Iron, and Steve Rogers, America's Captain. Friends, this is my brother, Loki.” He puts emphasis on 'brother', shaking Loki good-naturedly.

Loki looks down the end of his nose at them. “From how you described them, Thor, I had imagined that their appearance would suggest a greater level of intelligence.” He raises handcuffed hands to point at Tony – the cuffs glow faintly; magic, Tony guesses. (Fucking _magic_ , what is his life? A part of him died when he had to admit that it existed outside of the heads of billionaire British ladies.) “He is wearing sunglasses indoors.”

“Hey, fuck you, man, I was knocked out by a robot!” Tony says, swaying a little more with the effort.

“I am aware,” Loki says. Thor beams.

“My brother,” Thor says, “had opportunity to escape from his prison when the HYDRA agents broke their comrades out, but he instead chose to join us in the fight against them!” He looks like he's about to burst with pride.

Loki sniffs. “I was simply offended by their organisation. They sought to use the technology of our people for their own short-sighted and ill-conceived ends.”

“' _Our_ people',” Thor repeats, beaming some more.

“You are going to hear whatever you want to hear, aren't you?” Loki asks, barely containing a sigh.

“Verily,” Thor replies. Tony swears that the ridiculousness of his vocabulary is in direct proportion to how excited he is at any given moment. “You incapacitated several HYDRA agents, while keeping them alive, as the people of Midgard claim to prefer.”

“You also got my shield back,” Steve adds, “and Tony's helmet.”

“That was you?” Tony asks. At Loki's bored nod, he says, “Well, thanks for throwing it at my head, I'm sure that helped my concussion.”

“I was never skilled at hammer throwing, or throwing of any other sort. That is Thor's domain.”

“You managed okay with the shield,” Tony mutters. Jesus, it's a sad day when even supervillains love Captain America.

“He's not _completely_ reformed,” Thor says. He lifts his chin towards Natasha and Coulson. “How is Clint?”

“Still unconscious,” Steve says, “but he's breathing on his own.”

Tony's pretty sure Natasha would kill Clint if he wasn't.

“He shall be fine,” Thor decides, nodding his head sharply as if decreeing it. “He is of a strong constitution.”

“See?” Tony bumps his shoulder against Steve's, and immediately feels nauseous. “Can't keep the fucker down.”

-

Probably the most disturbing thing Tony has ever seen – more than Hammer's latest fumbling with a welding kit, the detailed files Howard had on Steve (seriously though, he was _obsessed_ , it's starting to freak Tony out), or that _Captain America_ movie from 1990 that was scarily accurate in predicting Steve's resurrection (he filmed Steve's reaction, but Steve 'accidentally' broke the camera) – is Natasha playing nurse. And not in the sexy Halloween costume way, but rather in the scary Nurse Ratched way. Natasha's less about those little hats with the crosses on them and more about a strict regiment of nutrition, exercise, and rest. Tony maybe even feels a little sorry for Clint; he's back in the gym the day after he's released from the hospital. The words 'no pain, no gain' actually pass Natasha's lips as she ruthlessly bends Clint's arms all sorts of upsetting ways.

This is even more obvious to Tony because of how much Pepper and Steve are babying him, and he's only got stitches in his cheek and bruises hidden beneath his hair. He's not the one who has to lift weights with a through-and-through in his right shoulder and a broken leg.

He's not entirely sure that Clint isn't getting off on it a bit, though, judging by his heavy breathing whenever Natasha wraps herself around his back, helping him to brace his arm. Steve says that it's their business and that Tony definitely shouldn't be speculating on what they do behind closed doors. Pepper simply nods knowingly when Steve's back is turned, much to Tony's delight.

Maybe it's because he's feeling an uncharacteristic kinship towards his beaten up team mates, or just because of the lingering effects of the concussion, but somehow Steve manages to talk him into having everyone around to his house for some kind of belated Christmas thing. It's already the first week of January and the tree that Pepper and Steve got is looking sad and dead, but that puts absolutely no dampeners on Steve's holiday spirit.

They get takeout from Thor's favourite Chinese restaurant, of which the employees are in turn bemused and terrified of this completely insane blond dude who comes in every few weeks and is invariably called away by bland men in suits driving cars with blacked out windows. There's enough to feed an entire block party, and Tony ends up just giving the delivery guy a fistful of cash and telling him to keep the change.

They camp out in the biggest reception room after dragging in every chair they can find. Clint gets a spot on the couch but still has to have a chair for his leg. Tony bitches about this for a solid ten minutes, because it means hauling an extra one down from the attic. Which Steve ends up getting, because Tony's still having the occasional dizzy spell (thankfully he's pretty used to having a less than stellar sense of equilibrium, so it doesn't really bother him), but it's the principle of the matter.

“You know, Santa is based on his dad,” Darcy says, pointing, and spilling, her mug of eggnog in Thor's general direction. She is sitting _very_ close to Rhodey; Tony caught Thor and Jane giving him a speech about 'honour and chivalry' earlier on that had an air of '...and I want her back by _eleven_ , young man' about it. “Norse children would leave sugar and hay out for Sleipnir on Solstice Eve as Odin rode him across the sky in the Wild Hunt. Then Christianity and Hallmark got in on it and made the whole thing infinitely less cool.” She shrugs at the curious looks this draws. “I'm taking an online course in Norse mythology.”

“Didn't Loki give birth to Sleipnir?” Bruce asks. Judging by the look that crosses his face, he instantly regrets bringing this up.

Thor grimaces. “We do not speak of that.”

“What's Sleipnir?” Steve asks slowly.

“Eight-legged horse,” Darcy answers. “Don't worry, Loki was also a horse at the time.”

“I wasn't...” Steve starts, then trails off, looking distressed. Tony waves a hand in front of his face.

“I think you broke him,” he says. “Is there anything you haven't taken a class in?”

“I didn't care for my university's physical education requirement.”

“But 'requirement' suggests that you did have to do it,” Tony counters, quite brilliantly, he feels. “So what sport did you play?”

Darcy blinks long and slow. “Basketball,” she says after a moment.

There's a second when everyone's gaze drops a little lower than her eyes, before Thor clears his throat loudly and everyone snaps to attention.

“You must have played a... rousing game,” Tony says. Steve shakes his head disapprovingly.

“You do know that your fiancée is _right there_ , don't you?” Darcy asks.

Pepper smiles calmly. “Well, I was on my college's volleyball team. Interstate champions of 1993. Women's college,” she says to Tony's wide-eyed expression. “No men allowed.”

“Oh Pepper, if I'd known you back then...”

She sniffs. “We probably would have ended up getting hitched on a whim. I had a thing for bad boys when I was younger.” Tony snuggles against her a little more, smiles as she threads her fingers through his hair, mindful of the bruises. “I suppose I still do,” she says.

Clint makes a gagging sound. “Someone pass me a sick bag.”

“Get it yourself,” Tony says. “Oh, wait...”

Of course, Steve wants to watch _It's A Wonderful Life_ even though he's already seen it four times since the beginning of November, and Tony might actually break the television if he hears that fucking child say one more goddamn thing about angels. Steve looks at him like he's just stomped on a puppy when he expresses this feeling and then everybody outvotes him, even though this is his house and it really should be an executive decision.

“As Chief Executive Officer,” Pepper says, “I'm going to side with Steve.”

“You're not CEO of _the house_!”

“No, but I am the CEO of _you_.”

He deflates. “Yeah, okay.”

He spends most of the movie playing _Snake_ on his phone. He gets that this is a life-affirming story for Steve and everything, and that he even knows who all the actors are, but films about how great it is to be a virtuous person really aren't Tony's thing. Of course, this pretty much cuts out all the classic Christmas movies and leaves him with, like, _Bad Santa_ , which, it would an understatement to say, Steve did not enjoy.

They're about three quarters of the way through the film when a strangled noise from his left catches his, and everyone else's, attention. They switched the lights off before starting the movie, but he can still pinpoint the source of the noise to Clint. Natasha is sitting to Clint's right, stretching his arm out and bending his fingers back. With light from the screen flickering over them, Clint's face almost looks... wet. Tony's not the only one to notice.

“Uh, do you think maybe this isn't the best time to be doing that?” Steve asks.

“There's a schedule,” Natasha says shortly.

Clint draws a shaky, wheezing breath and says, “Yeah, I've gotta exercise it every--” The rest of what he was going to say is cut off by a yelp.

“Do you want to go somewhere else?” Natasha asks him, and he nods, eyes darting to the rest of them for a second. Tony looks down at his phone again.

“Do you need some help?” Steve asks as Natasha clamps an arm around Clint's back and levers him up.

Thor fidgets with his beer bottle. “Yes, can we be of assistance?” he adds.

“It's fine,” she says, and seemingly takes Clint's weight with ease. This just lends even more evidence to Tony's suspicion that Steve's not the only super soldier around here. It's not like Tony thinks about Clint that much, but he's sparred him once or twice and the guy is like a wall of solid muscle. Natasha seems to have no problem being his life-sized crutch, though.

“Should we talk to them about this?” Bruce asks once Natasha has helped Clint from the room. “I mean, she's been pushing him really hard.”

“That's not a good idea,” Pepper says. “You've all _met_ Natasha, right?”

“Yeah, let's not make this another miserable Christmas spent in this house,” Tony agrees.

Steve bites his lip, looking conflicted, before he finally nods and settles back against the couch. He doesn't seem as interested in the film any more, though, and he keeps glancing towards the doorway. Natasha and Clint don't come back even after the credits roll.

Tony shakes himself awake before he drowns in the cloying sentimentality of it all. “I'm gonna get something to drink. Anyone want anything?”

“Another cup of tea?” Bruce asks, holding the cup out to him somewhat apprehensively. Tony takes it carefully, feeling very much like if he makes any sudden movements, Bruce is going to bolt. Or Hulk out. Either/or, really.

“Eggnog top up, please!” Darcy sing-songs, shoving her glass at him.

“Virgin eggnog,” Rhodey adds, to her consternation.

“I noticed that you had leftover Halloween candy in the kitchen,” Thor says gravely.

Jane looks up. “Oh! Pop Rocks, if you have them!”

“Glass of milk?” Steve asks, flashing him a toothy grin when Tony narrows his eyes and sucks on his teeth.

“Lady Pepper?” Tony asks. “Anything _you_ want me to bring you?”

“Just yourself,” she says sweetly.

“I heard him use that on a waitress once,” Rhodey says as Tony rolls his eyes and leaves the room. “Hot coffee, all over his brand new Levis.”

Natasha is already in the kitchen when he gets there, putting fruits and vegetables that Tony didn't know they had into a blender that he didn't know they owned.

“How's Clint?”

Natasha mashes the lid down on the blender and switches it on. “He'll be fine,” she says over the noise, her tone sharp and her stare long.

“Cool.” He turns around and grabs a box of tea off the counter before he accidentally tells her something he shouldn't. Anything, really; this is clearly an interrogation/torture technique of hers. “Do you know how to make tea?” he asks, glancing over his shoulder.

She shakes her head, her gaze softening just a little.

He squints at the instructions. “It can't be that hard, right?”

She doesn't deign this with a response, and he hadn't really expected her to; it's comfortingly normal. He reads the back of the box for a minute longer, wondering where Steve, who is apparently the only one of them who actually uses this kitchen for its intended purpose, would have put the pans.

Natasha shuts the blender off, and takes a breath. “I know you all think I'm bitch for making Clint work so hard.”

Tony freezes, then slowly puts the box down. “We don't think you're a bitch...” he says, “...because of _that_.”

“Funny.”

“I'm here all week.”

“Unfortunately, you're here a lot longer than that.” She narrows her eyes. “We aren't like you guys,” she says, and sticks her chin out like she's anticipating a fight.

“Who's 'we' and who's 'you guys'?”

“Clint and I. We're not immortal, we don't have super strength, and we don't have a suit of armour to protect us. We have to be at the peak of physical fitness everyday, or we're done. The rest of you have lives outside, even Steve now, but for me and Clint, S.H.I.E.L.D. is it. We stop moving and we die.”

“Are you comparing yourself to a shark?” he asks. He takes a second to think about it. “Apt.”

“Clint has to be okay,” she continues as if he hadn't spoken. “Because he doesn't have a place in the world otherwise. And he has to be okay now, not in six months, not in a year.” She pauses and he looks at the ceiling because where else is he supposed to look and _what on Earth_ possessed her to offload this on _him_? “You're lucky, you know.”

He lifts a shoulder, moving his gaze from the ceiling to somewhere beyond her left shoulder. “I know.”

“Good,” she says. She holds the blender jug up. “I'm taking this,” she says, and leaves the room before he can say anything about it.

Clint and Natasha rejoin the group eventually, once Tony has returned with everyone's demands and wedged himself in between Pepper and Steve. Clint looks marginally less pale and unwell.

“We are not watching this,” is the first thing Clint says when he catches what's on the TV. _Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer_. “This made me cry when I was a kid!”

Tony scoffs, then has some kind of weird alcoholic eggnog flashback to being inconsolable over this stupid claymation thing when he was five. He thinks that maybe Howard drove him around in one of his cars until Tony calmed down, but that doesn't sound very plausible.

They make it through the first twenty minutes before Thor rumbles, “I can now see my father's influence on your depiction of this individual,” and there's unanimous agreement to shut it off.

By ten, it seems like they've watched every Christmas movie ever made – they all blur together in one brightly-coloured, sugary mess to Tony. He wonders if Steve's trying some immersion therapy on him; like, by tomorrow he's going to be sending small children to the butcher's to buy turkeys for his poor employees. Or maybe Steve just likes jaunty tunes and the colour red a lot.

“Tony,” Pepper says quietly, some indeterminate amount of time later, as she gently shakes him by the shoulder.

He sucks in a breath. “I'm awake. Totally awake.”

Her hand is warm on the back of his neck, and that just makes him want to close his eyes all over again. She has a couple of small white pills in her other hand. “Painkillers,” she says, giving them to him, then leans forward to grab a glass of water off the coffee table. He doesn't even ask how she knew that his stitches were beginning to throb, just takes the glass offered and swallows them.

The TV is still casting its flickering light over the room, now on an infomercial that has Thor's undivided attention. The configuration of the chairs have moved around a little... and is that _Coulson_?

“When'd Coulson get here?”

“About an hour ago,” Pepper says. “You were asleep.”

He hums something around a yawn that is meant to convey his displeasure at having Coulson in his house again, but probably even Pepper can't decode that. Coulson is talking to Natasha over the head of a sleeping Clint, and, if Tony's not mistaken – and he never is, he's Tony Stark for fuck's sake – he's wearing a Brown University sweatshirt. Which... Tony was sure Coulson's suit was surgically attached to his body. And that he was born a middle-aged secret badass.

Steve is warm against his side as he leans over and says, “Hey, go back to sleep,” and then quite abruptly Tony's being rearranged so that his head is in Pepper's lap and his legs in Steve's. Her fingers settle in his hair, Steve's hands against his back.

Oh, okay then, he thinks, and shuts his eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> The 1990 Captain America movie mentioned is [a thing that is real](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cs8rFsmhNTc&noredirect=1). Cap was played by J.D. Salinger's son, because why not?


End file.
